


Little Bits

by Deejaymil



Series: A Picture's Worth [4]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Fluff, Fun, Gen, More characters than tagged, Multiple Pairings, Prompt Fill, Random & Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-04-26 15:19:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 23,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14404890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Some stories are too short to tell in full...





	1. Chapter 1

**One: Well, it's never done _that_ before.**

“In my defence,” Reid splutters, his expression almost as shamefaced as Emily’s isn’t, “it’s never gone like _that_ before…” Like ‘that’, Hotch assumes, means it’s never ended in twenty-four trained agents pulling their weapons on him as alarms wail and Anderson attempts a heroic, but ultimately misguided, tackle of Emily.

“In my defence,” Emily snaps, “my reaction to being startled isn’t exactly _unusual_ in our line of work…”

Unfortunately, for Anderson, her reaction to being ‘startled’ was also to throw him into a wall.

Hotch is a little proud, even as he looks down at the pile of paperwork on his desk and his two guilty agents, sighing and wondering if it’s not too late to take up child-care as a career. “Reid, no more ‘magic’ tricks in the bullpen, especially not ones liable to be ‘startling’.” Reid nods, appropriately scolded. One child down, Hotch turns his attention to the other, more stubborn, one: “And Emily?”

“Yeah, Hotch?”

“Please… try not to shoot things unless they’re actively attacking you.”

The look on her face says, ‘no promises’, even as her mouth shapes the words, “Sure. Does that mean I get my gun back?”

 

**Two: The seeds planted long ago are finally beginning to sprout.**

When Jack Hotchner was born, Hotch remembers bringing him home and spending a single, brilliant afternoon lying with his infant son on a blanket on the lawn. Haley was inside. There was no one out here but him, his son, and the birds around.

And a seed. Jack’s chubby hand swung around and found it, Hotch quickly relinquishing the object and, absently, pushing it into the dirt. It was never thought of again, until it grew.

When Jack was four, his mom died. The house was packed up and they moved. “Daddy, can we bring my tree?” he asked of the sapling that grew so out of place on the corner of the lawn. Hotch, who’d never taken much notice, shrugged and agreed.

When Jack was ten, the tree bore fruit. Spencer was there. “A peach tree,” he said. “A Taoist story tells of a tree that produces a peach of immortality every three thousand years. If you eat it, you become immortal.”

“Immortal means you never die, right?” asked Jack. He looked at Hotch as he said this.

They left the fruit there, but that look never faded.

 

**Three: To be fair, your character wasn’t really sure what they were ordering off the menu…**

Elle, on a quest to find out just what exactly Reid _doesn’t_ know, has started ordering for him at restaurants. Hotch is a little unnerved by this. It’s not that he doesn’t trust Elle, it’s just that Reid has the kind of face that makes him eminently easy to pick on and Hotch is technically supposed to be in control here.

Hotch decides something as he watches Elle pick a meal with a dangerous grin: it’s hard being a parent when your kids are grown-ass adults and also trained federal agents.

“Don’t give him that,” he warns.

“What, what is that?” Gideon asks distractedly, peering at the menu. “ _Tripas a Moda do Porto?_ That’s delicious.  Portuguese. You’ll love it.”

Reid looks worried. “What is it?” he asks, looking to Hotch. Elle looks to Hotch too, her expression a clear ‘don’t tell him’ that he decides not to cross, in the interest of unity.

It’s discovered that, no, Reid does _not_ know what tripe is. In his ignorance, he does enjoy eating it though. In the end, isn’t that really what parenting is all about?

 

**Four: Picture prompt!** [ **When One Door Closes, Another Door Opens!** ](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/08/04/us/04DOORcombo/04DOORcombo-tmagArticle-v3.jpg)

Emily Prentiss has always been, throughout her entire life, two very different things. One: she’s always been lonely. Her earliest memories are a closed bedroom door. Two: she’s always been a little magic, or maybe that came after.

She doesn’t know when it started. She doesn’t know when it will end. All she knows is that, for her, doors aren’t the same as they are for others. Oh, they are _most_ of the time… but not when she’s asleep, and not when she’s dreaming. Those things aren’t always at the same time, either.

When she was small, she’d fall asleep and dream of opening her hated bedroom door and finding excitement on the other side. Walking through to find a group of school children staring excitedly at her, their words a language she doesn’t know and their world so different to hers. Or slipping through and finding herself in a stranger’s nursery, a baby smiling at her from the crib. One time, she’d slipped through her door into a circus dressing room—hiding behind shawls decorated richly with spangles. Whenever she woke up, she was in her own bed, with muddy feet and crayoned hands and pockets full of sequins.

Now that she’s an adult, sometimes the doors open when she’s awake and at her loneliest. One time, undercover, she’d gone for a walk in the middle of the night, opening the door of his Tuscan villa only to find her childhood bedroom on the other side.

Another, she’s being held by a maniac’s cult and the door she opens leads to the outside.

Both times, she closes it without stepping through. Both times, it’s because her job comes first.

And tonight, she’s awake and dreaming of a world without Doyle on her tail, walking around her apartment wishing she could be safe. It’s a waking dream and she should have known better before opening her bathroom door and stepping through with her head turned and her gaze locked behind her, paranoid, always, of the man with the shamrock tattoo.

“Emily?”

When she turns, startled to be reminded that she’s different, she’s in an unfamiliar apartment and Spencer is staring at her from the couch.

Fuck.

“I can explain,” she says.

But he just stands, smiles widely, and murmurs, “You too, huh?” and she’s reminded: magic usually comes in threes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Six. What is that strange sound that keeps interrupting your character’s work?**

Someone, and no one is admitting who—although Reid has his suspicions—has taken April Fool’s Day too far. There’s a select corner of the bullpen sitting in misery, as the source of the ‘noise’ that they can’t convince the higher-ups they’re hearing is hunted down.

“I swear, Morgan, if you brought this in, I’ll—” Prentiss is snarling in-between covering her ears.

Reid, who’s long given up covering his ears in favour of searching for the device, just looks glum. “You should be glad,” he tells Emily through the shrill buzzing and Morgan’s smug grin. “The ear-aging process that leads to the inability to hear certain noises, like this one, is called presbycusis, and it can begin as early as eighteen. Honestly, by your age—”

Emily sits up, looking at him. Reid immediately senses danger.

“You look great today,” he finishes wisely.

There’s a slam of a door and Rossi strides out. Reid _seriously_ doubts he can— “Right, if someone doesn’t shut that noise up, you’re all getting written up!”

Silence. The younger agents—and Emily—sigh with relief.

From inside Hotch’s office, someone is gleeful.

**Seven. Today is the day I conquer the world.**

Ever since Spencer could remember, his mother had been sure of one thing. Only really the one thing, two if he counted how much she loved him. She never doubted that, even when doubting things that Spencer took for granted, like the gravity that held them down.

The other thing she was sure of was that he was going to conquer the world.

At first, he’d laughed. It just seemed so… grandiose. After all, the first time she’d said it, he was only six and six-year-olds couldn’t conquer anything. But, after a while, he’d begun to understand. She didn’t mean conquer in the way that it was formally defined, with the kind of power he didn’t possess. She meant that he was going to face the world and refuse to be broken by it the same way she had.

He was going to make a difference.

By thirteen, he decided: he’d cure schizophrenia by twenty-five. That was how he’d conquer the world. And it all began today, as he packed his bag to leave for college for the first time.

That was the last time she said it, but he remembered.

**Eight. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and your characters are ready to…?**

Dave is pretty sure that if he hadn’t gotten Jack in on this wager, there’s no way they’d be standing here right now. Honestly, he keeps pinching himself, completely unsure that he _is_ actually here, right now, standing watching Aaron ‘Uptight’ Hotchner face his biggest foe yet.

A gentle, grassy incline.

“Dave are you _sure_ this is what you…” Hotch begins, brow furrowing. “Out of anything you could have asked for from our poker game, and you want _this_?”

“He definitely wants this,” Jack giggles, absolutely giddy. “Come on, Dad—I can’t believe you’ve never rolled down a hill before!”

“Maybe lose the suit,” Dave suggests, earning a glare. “And the tie.”

Another glare.

“…And your shoes.”

“I still don’t understand the point—”

It’s Jack who answers. “It’s fun.”

There’s silence after that. Hotch nods firmly and Dave sees the exact moment he decides that this is happening. Anything to make his kid smile.

As it turns out, Dave isn’t the only one laughing as they vanish down the hill with twin yelps.

On the second go, he even joins in.

**Nine. Character A has changed something about their appearance and Character B cannot for the life of them figure out what it is.**

It’s a monumental challenge of their profiling skills, the entire team gathered in a worried huddle in the conference room as they discuss the possibilities, minus one very puzzling genius.

“It’s his hair,” Morgan announces.

“It’s not his hair,” says Hotch, who keeps a very close eye on his team members’ hair—especially Reid’s—in expectation of his weekly ‘tell Dr. Reid we have a dress code’ memo.

“It’s his cardigan, guys,” JJ guesses. “This one actually looks like it was made in this century.”

“His tie,” tries Rossi, trying to turn his head to study the tie of the man sitting at his desk unaware of his surveillance. “Maybe his tie? I don’t know. The kid has a weirdly large collection of horrendous ties. I swear, him and you shop at the same place, Aar—”

“Oh,” says Emily, who has finally worked out why Reid is looking so distinctly un-Reidy to their eyes. “His socks. They _match.”_

Horrified, the team realise that she’s right.

“It’s like we don’t even know him anymore,” says Hotch sadly.

**Ten. For as long as your characters can remember, that door has always opened to the same boring place. Today, it opens to somewhere different.**

Magic always comes in three; they’d forgotten that.

For a while, Emily was wild with the idea that she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t the only one with this strange power to open doors to places they weren’t supposed to go—Spencer could do it too, had _always_ been able to do it. After a while, it became normal to go home to her house, open her spare room door, and step through into his living room. They’d watch movies and do nothing, or they’d follow each other through an open door and see where they ended up. Spencer’s doors didn’t always seem to open to this world, and Emily loved that.

But, one day, a door that had always been a door to them opened by itself. They turned and stared at the door to his cupboard, both frozen. What if something had followed them back?

Someone familiar appeared in the cupboard, peering out at them. Spencer made a noise. Emily began to laugh.

“Hi, guys,” said Jack Hotchner, awkwardly waving. “Uh. Don’t tell Dad?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .... These prompt fills got strange, sorry guys!


	3. Chapter 3

**Eleven & Twelve. Character A has always wanted to do this, and Character B doesn't think it's a great idea; character A is determined. & “Just try. Just this once. You won’t regret it, I promise!”**

“Name one reason why I shouldn’t do this.” Emily has the kind of grin that usually precedes her doing something risky, and Reid looks around like he’s hoping for Hotch to pop out of the alley nearby and threaten to write her up.

“You’re drunk,” he protests, darting forward and catching her with a hand on either side of her hip. “And it’s illegal.” Even as he says it, her feet leave the ground and he’s left supporting her weight.

“Who’s going to book us for climbing _street lamps_?” she teases, leaning back further into his arms. His heart is thudding, and it’s entirely because he’s scared of dropping her, that’s it. “We’re FBI agents.”

“Which is exactly why we _shouldn’t_.”

Even as he says it, she drops from the lamp and onto the ground, turning and catching his hands as he goes to pull them away. “We’ll, Doctor,” she says, leaning close in a wave of heat and alcohol-scented-air. “Is there a law about dancing beside a street lamp too?”

He swallows. “No. Why?”

She shows him.

“Someone is going to see us…” He’s aware that he’s making what she calls his ‘distress noises’, looking around wildly to make sure no one sees him getting dragged about in her arms.

“So what?” Her grip on his waist tightens, one arm slipping to the small of his back. “Maybe I want people to see me. Maybe I want them to say, ‘Hey, look at her—she doesn’t care that she’s past it, she’s still having fun’.”

He shoots her a look. “You’re not past it.” Not even close. Right now, she’s devastatingly young in a way he’s never let himself be.

“Try, just this once. You won’t regret it, I promise.”

It’s not climbing a street lamp, at least, so he sighs and leans into her arms. “Fine. Don’t tell Morgan.” She grins again: “Or Hotch. _Or JJ.”_

And he’s not entirely sure that he’s sold on dancing, but he also definitely doesn’t regret it. Not when she’s so warm and solid against him. Not when it starts to rain, his hair frizzing and hers flat to her head. Not when he drunkenly needs to sit and almost takes her with him, her slipping away once she’s sure that he’s landing softly.

And not even when she takes advantage of his sitting to climb the street lamp anyway, whooping the whole way as though she’s only just realised what it’s like to be reckless.

 

**Thirteen. Character A is romantically interested in Character B and brings them flowers. Character A is allergic.**

The first date they go on, Will brings her flowers. They’re a disaster: the flowers, not the date. The date he actually manages to save, despite the fact that she’s sneezing wildly with her nose running like a tap and her hands going all rashy from where she’d brushed against the flowers moving them away from her.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him through sneezes. “I’m allergic to daisies…”

“They’re asters,” he says, his accent still hitting her in all the right places even when she’s leaking horribly from every facial orifice. Which is _one_ way to be super attractive, for sure. “Aw, I’m sorry, Jen. I messed up…”

And he just looks so painfully saddened by the idea that she can’t help but like—like, just like, honestly—him a little more that day, especially when they spend the rest of the night huddled up in his bedroom, away from the asters and doing nothing but eating ice cream and watching movies.

When Henry is five, he brings her home flowers.

“Give them to your Daddy,” she tells him between sneezes. “Mommy is allergic to daisies.”

“They’re asters,” Henry says in the kind of sad voice that means Uncle Spencer probably taught him what they were called before sending him home. “Not daisies…”

“They’re in the daisy family, bud,” Will responds, taking the flowers from him and smiling. “Don’t worry. It’s an easy mistake to make.”

 

**Fourteen. Character A explains an aspect of their worldview to Character B for the first time.**

They’re having a popcorn and Dr Who night, which turns into a popcorn and _wine_ and Dr Who night when Emily shows up with a bottle that she fully intends to get him tipsy with. Somehow, like it always does, the wine goes to her head and, before she knows it, they’re treating this like sleepover-night-at-Dr-Reid’s and she’s been offered a pair of his old pyjamas for later; currently, they’re huddled up under a blanket on his couch while he drunkenly tries to explain mice and depression to her.

“Stop talking about mice,” she begs of him after an hour and a half. “Tell me something interesting.”

He looks affronted. “Mice are interesting,” and, honestly, if she now didn’t know that he’s the kind of guy to wear duck pyjamas, she’d have given up on him right then and there. “What’s more interesting than the brain functions of clinically depressed mice when exposed to—”

“You.”

He stares at her, mouth open. She lobs a piece of popcorn in, using his startled swallowing to continue.

“Tell me something about _you_. Something no one else knows.”

“Like what?”

She ponders for a moment, eyes landing on his socks. “Why do you wear odd socks? And _don’t_ say because they’re lucky—you’re a card counter from Vegas. You don’t believe in luck.”

It’s the wine that lets him answer, she’s sure. “I wore them mismatched by accident once,” he mumbles, blushing. “A… a girl I liked complimented me on them.”

Disappointing, she thinks, realising that he’d worn them before her.

“Changing an aspect of yourself for a girl, Dr Reid,” she teases. “That’s not very modern. But, understandable.”

His startled look makes what she’s stupidly about to tell the genius profiler worth it: “Understandable? What did you change about yourself for someone else?”

She leans close, mock whispering to draw him in: “I only wear my belt crooked because I know it annoys someone… and I’m waiting for the day he snaps and fixes it.”

Reid blinks. Once. Twice.

“It… annoys… me?” he says. His eyes flick to her belt buckle, deliberately cocked to the side. “ _Oh_.”

“Oh,” she agrees, arching a little and watching his eyes. “What are you going to do about it, Doctor?”

He impresses her with his answer.

He uses his teeth.

 

**Fifteen. It’s a cat! Or a fluffy dog! Or an in-universe pet of choice. But what is it doing here?**

There’s a black cat sleeping soundly on the bed next to her when Penelope wakes up and, for a heartbeat, she forgets why. She even panics a little, even though the kitty is cute and all purry and she loves cats, really, she does. Especially cute ones.

Then, she remembers. She loves cats. That’s why she has so many cat things; it’s also why she’d taken Sergio in when Emily died. Is dead.

“Oh,” says Penelope to the purring cat, only winching a little when he opens his green, green eyes and kitty smiles at her with his whiskers all perked. Probably thinking about cat things, like breakfast, and not horrible people things, like how much it hurts to remember that Emily gone. But, Penelope is an adult and a good cat mom and won’t let Sergio see that she’s sad. “Good morning, handsome boy.”

“Mrrrp,” says Sergio, which Penelope assumes is cat for ‘I miss Emily, but you’ll do. Breakfast?’

“I miss her too,” she tells him. And, if she cries while feeding him, he’s not going to tell anyone.


	4. Magic Bits (May 1st-3rd)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These prompts are from May's Magical Minific prompts, over at /r/fanfiction, so... they're even weirder than my usual fare. But people probably expect that of me by now...

**One. Your character believes in magic! Or, maybe they don’t and have a pretty good reason why.**

Aaron Hotchner never believed in magic. No one had ever bothered to tell him stories of magic, no one had ever read to him when he was a child. This was because no one around him believed in magic either; not Aaron’s father, who was a man of rough hands and little heart, and not Aaron’s mother, who was a woman broken up by both of those things. What was magic when life was already unpredictable enough?

No. Aaron never believed in magic. Not when he was small and forgotten. Not when he was older and learning that his father wasn’t the only cruel man in the world. And not even when he had his own son, although he was always careful to pretend for Jack.

Emily Prentiss didn’t believe in magic either. Maybe for a little while, when she was small, she had. She remembered being held up high by someone who loved her, her neck tipped back and watching rose petals spiral from a stained-glass roof of every possible colour, dipping and whirling around her wide-spread fingers. She remembered believing that someone must have flown, in order to send them down to her.

Then, she forgot. There was Matthew and John and Rome and nothing magical about any of it. There was Doyle. There was loneliness.

There was absolutely no magic.

Jennifer Jareau and Derek Morgan didn’t believe either. What was the point? People died, magic or not, and there was always someone cold and hurtful waiting in the wings for people just like them. People vulnerable and small. Magic couldn’t save them, so there wasn’t any damn point to it. JJ, unlike Derek, at least tried to pretend that she hadn’t given up on the idea. Derek never bothered.

Maybe David Rossi had once believed, but it was a long time ago and he’d buried too many people since then.

If Jason Gideon ever believed, he sure as hell wasn’t telling anyone about it, and no one would find him in time to ask. But he was always far more interested in birds than anything less tangible.

Spencer Reid still believes in magic. Maybe he’s a man of science, but he’s also a man of wonder—and there’s always someone left to be astounded by.

Maybe one day he’ll convince the others.

 

**Two. Your character experiences the joy—or terror—of their feet leaving the ground.**

It’s a dream. She knows it’s a dream. There’s a dark-haired girl dancing on a hill, the girl that Emily’s never been able to save. But now? Now, she takes that child’s hand, the ground beneath them fading away. They’re dancing together with steps made of wings and dresses made of the starry sky.

They never land. Emily wakes up, still in the sky. The stars outside glint like they remember, and there’s a warm hand on her knee. Spencer. She’s on the jet.

She’s safe.

 

**Three. For your characters, this Thursday is exceptionally strange because they have woken up with powers/abilities they didn’t have—or didn’t know they had—before.**

Hotch doesn’t really know how to deal with this budding new predicament, so he goes to the people he trusts the most to help: his team.

“Thank you for coming in early,” he says as they filter into the room, every one of them staring at him as he gently blossoms. “As you can see, this isn’t our usual kind of case.”

“You’re shedding flowers,” Reid points out, staring at the floor where the petals drifting from Hotch’s hair every time he turns are beginning to collect. “Uh. Are you okay?”

His observational skills are fantastic. Hotch counts to three before speaking again.

“I woke up like this.” Hotch brushes more petals from his shoulder and frowns as leaves tumble from his hands. “I’m really not sure what to do.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dave says in the kind of voice that Hotch sighs to hear. “I really think you’ve _rose_ to the occasion.”

“ _Dave,_ ” scolds JJ, earning a grateful smile from Hotch. “Leaf him alone.”

Hotch sighs. It’s going to be a long Thursday.


	5. Magic Bits (May 4th-10th)

**Four. Use these words: fairy-dust, gleam, glacial, sleep.**

They’re leaving Alaska and frost lays lightly on every surface, a glacial cold stealing into JJ’s bones as she huddles into her coat and steps closer to Reid on the dock. There’s sleep lining his face and a gleam of excited awe in his eyes as he tiredly smiles at her.

“Many mythologies equate the frost with magical properties akin to fairy-dust,” he says with a look that suggests he kinds of believes in those properties.

JJ just smiles and bumps her shoulder against his, loving that this job hasn’t changed him.

**Five. What is your character pulling out of their hat today?**

They chase their Unsub into a nearby hat shop, Reid bouncing neatly from a display in his haste to cut the man off from the exit. Emily goes left, Reid right, Hotch darting down the centre of the displays of what look like men’s top hats.

“FBI, stand down!” Emily hollers, hoping that this guy is smart enough to just give up. She watches him pause through the aisle of hats, Rossi appearing nearby and lingering under what looks like a giant novelty hat suspended above. There’s a brief moment of waiting, then all hell breaks loose.

Emily doesn’t see who he fires at; she just knows that he’s fired. Her and Hotch take him down fast, hats and shelves flying, Reid darting past with a yelped, “Rossi!”

Uh oh. When the man is handcuffed, Emily moves quickly to where Rossi has vanished under said novelty hat, Reid helping haul him out—thankfully, unharmed.

“You really are a magician, Spencer,” she tells him cheekily, seeing Rossi scowl. “Pulling an agent out of a hat.”

“I can still fire you all,” Rossi retorts.

Emily just winks and helps him up.

 

**Six. They’re told to expect the unexpected, but what they find behind the door is almost too much to believe.**

“This is truly a terrible place,” Emily says, her head in her hands. Reid pats her carefully, feeling thrown off course himself. How could they have ever expected… but, they were warned. This is all on them.

Beside them, the open door of Rossi’s closet beckons. “I’m still not entirely sure what they _are_ ,” he admits, eyeing the colourful display within. “What’s a—”

Emily’s hand on his mouth answers his question: they’re never to speak of this place again.

 

**Seven. The potion only had three ingredients, so it’s a wonder it even worked at all—though not as expected. Now your characters have to clean up the mess.**

“Don’t worry, it’s only got three ingredients,” Rossi had said as he’d served them his ‘secret recipe’ homebrew. “How bad could it possibly be?”

JJ, knowing better than to trust that, had declined. Unfortunately, the rest of her team—smartest people in almost any room her ass—hadn’t been quite so clever. Whatever Rossi had used to get her team smashed, he’d clearly underestimated its potency.

There’s a rousing karaoke going on in the living room as JJ does a lap to check on her wayward team, bottle of water in hand and very glad she hasn’t partaken in the festivities. Arms around each other and hollering loud enough that JJ’s never going to be able to hear _Don’t Go Breaking My Heart_ again without remembering Hotch and Rossi staring deep into each other’s eyes as they drunkenly howl it to the heavens. While they’re distracted, she trades their half-empty alcohol glasses out for water and pushes the coffee table away from knee-banging height.

Emily and Morgan she finds on the grass outside, a distant _woooo-oh!_ from inside floating out after her.

“Are you guys okay?” JJ asks them, but they’re gone. They’re not even making words as JJ understand words to be, just hugging each other and sobbing in some frantic, damp kind of revelations like two toddlers making friends mid-tantrum. JJ’s not sure why they’re crying or what they’re saying, or even if they’re actually communicating in anything approaching English—Emily, she’s pretty sure, is speaking Russian—but she brings a blanket out and wraps it around their shoulders anyway, patting Emily on the head as she goes back inside.

“How are you guys?” she asks Reid and Garcia, finding them still sitting politely where they’d been put at the start of the night.

Garcia sips her drink through a crazy straw, shrugging brightly. “I’m fine. I don’t know what they’re talking about, we’re just peachy. Right, doc?”

She looks down at Reid, who stares at them both. Hands trembling around his glass and pupils blown wide, he looks stunned and confused and accidentally drunk.

“Is anyone else hallucinating?” he peeps, hugging his glass tightly and staring at the wall.

JJ sighs and goes to get some more water.

 

**Eight. Your character regales the other with a supernatural tale from their culture**.

Henry has decided that all witches are terrifying. Rossi, being the good unofficial-grandfather of the group that he is, has decided to dissuade him of this notion. He waits until JJ’s left the boy in the care of Reid and swoops in, settling Henry on his lap and shooting Reid a look that means ‘don’t ruin this for me, smartass’.

“Right, Henry, want to learn a lesson about stereotypes?” Rossi asks the four-year-old, who just looks confused and sticky. “Of course, you do—”

“Rossi, I—”

“Shut up, Reid. Do you know who Befana is, Henry?”

“No,” says Henry.

“Yes,” mutters Reid. Rossi stares at him until he shushes.

“Well, she looks like a witch, but she’s not. Covered in soot, wears black, rides a broomstick, the whole hog. Sounds scary, right?”

“Yes!” Henry sounds surer about this than he has about anything else yet today.

“Wrong! She’s _Christmas,_ boyo. She comes on Epiphany Eve and brings toys and caramelle and fruit to all the good kiddos, like you, and gives coal, onions, and garlic to the bad ones, like Reid over there.”

They both look at Reid, who blinks.

“Unk’ Spence can have mine,” Henry offers. “He’s good.”

“Aw, thanks, Henry—”

“He’s certainly something.” Rossi bounces the kid a bit. “See, witches aren’t so bad. Do you believe me now?”

“No!”

Rossi, who’d expected this, has another plan. With grave dignity, he procures from his pocket a bag of candy. “How about now?” he asks, offering the candy. Henry, nodding violently, takes it and beams. There, job done.

“You really shouldn’t bribe him into—” Reid, because he’s nothing if not predictable, shuts up immediately when Rossi throws another bag of candy at him.

 

**Nine. Use these words: broomstick, wolfsbane, argument, epiphany.**

“Who’s she?” Jack asks, pointing to a girl dressed in yellow and blue lycra. Hotch shifts the bag of candy on his right arm and frowns, unsure. Another girl runs past, a brewing argument between her and a friend about to be solved by the use of their broomsticks as battering rams.

“I don’t know,” he begins, before having an epiphany and turning to catch Reid’s attention. The man is procuring candy with Henry, but hurries over.

“We’re stuck on a costume,” Jack explains.

“Wolfbane!” Reid brightens dangerously. “So, in 1982—”

 

**Ten. No dialogue! Your characters observe otherworldly events.**

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang, but with the return of the restless dead in an unholy horde come to rend the living. Honestly, it’s almost cliché.

They’ve managed to get to higher ground, huddled up together in the top of an apartment building, on a roof watching what will probably be their last sunrise. They’re silent; they’re together. Unarmed; unafraid.

If this is the way the world ends, they don’t really mind. The skies are pink and gold and they’re feeling the warmth of it together.


	6. Chapter 6

**Fifteen. Use these words: green, pristine, star, hardware.**

It’s been a long week, turning into an even longer weekend, as Rossi tries to decide whether it’s a better idea to go help Reid before he hurts himself or if he should just stay here and continue getting even drunker.

“Stop staring at him,” Aaron chides, his own eyes locked on the small screen playing the game overhead. The bar they’re in is nice and quiet, the clientele all focused enough on their own lives and problems that no one is bothering the group of exhausted profilers too wired from their last case to go home. “You’re going to make him nervous.”

“Make _him_ nervous?” Rossi snorts, eyeing the green shirt, orange tie combo that Reid’s got going. He looks like an unripe pumpkin, as he stammers his way through flirting with the girl Morgan’s foisted his way. “That shirt’s scaring her enough for the both of us. Look at him, Hotch. He’s still trying. Kid’s a star, he really is, but he’s got no game.”

Hotch just hums, somehow looking as pristine and put together as if they haven’t been chasing murderers for three gruelling days. Rossi shrugs, turning away from Reid’s struggles.

“Just saying,” he quips quietly. “Kids never gonna get anywhere with girls until he stops thinking with all that juiced up software in his head and starts using the hardware instead. Those cheekbones should do all the work alone.”

Hotch chokes on his drink, and Rossi calls that a rousing success.

**Sixteen. There is a place, in the woods, far from home where a single weathered bench sits.**

There’s a place that Maeve used to go to when she was studying for her graduate degree and so stressed out that she could barely think to calm down. It always worked to help her, every single time. A bank of woods, never frightening even though it should have been. So far from humanity that she couldn’t hear cars or sirens or anything to remind her that the world kept spinning outside that singular place. It’s an old, hand-hewn bench, cut from a fallen tree and reclaimed by the forest. She’d found it by accident one day; ever since she’s made sure to come back here at least once every few months—just to make sure it’s still there.

It always is. She’s seen it in every possible season by now, from the heat of summer to the dead of winter, so cold that she can barely stand to stay.

It’s been a while since she’s been brave enough to visit that bench. She’s so much more fearful now. Holding Spencer at arms-length, never letting him closer than a hurried Sunday phone call. Never leaving her apartment. Never sneaking away.

She misses her bench and the safety it brought her, back when she was young and didn’t think that the world could be this frightening. Sometimes, she lies awake at night and wonders if she can run, just run as fast as she can so that the person hunting her can’t keep up. Keeping on running until she finds that bench, finds that safety in the woods.

She imagines asking Spencer to meet her there and imagines walked from the trees to see him for the first time standing there. In fall, because it would have to be fall, with the trees red and gold around him. In her imagination, he’s never looking at her, his back is turned. Sometimes, she closes her eyes in her imaginings and thinks of stepping forward, of saying, “We’re safe here,” and having him kiss her…

But, when she opens her eyes, she’s back in the apartment she sometimes expects to die in. There’s no fall trees, no dappled sunlight, no weathered bench, no assurance of safety.

And there’s no Spencer, except for a hurried call on Sundays.

She’s sure that it’s always going to be this way.

**Seventeen. Use these words: ensnare, ghost, noisy, fresh.**

“You’ve never heard of Scooby Doo?” Emily stares at Reid, stunned more about this than anything he’s ever told her about his life. “What kind of TV did you watch growing up?”

Reid shrugs, holding the long-range thermal imager up towards the building they’re watching. It reflects slightly off his face, leaving a ghost-like glow from his skin. “We didn’t really watch TV. After Dad left, we didn’t even have a set in the house. Mom thought they were too noisy, when she wasn’t convinced they were designed to ensnare vulnerable minds for governmental mind-control. I really don’t think I missed out on much.”

“Well, I mean, you missed out on The Fresh Prince of Belair,” Emily quips, receiving a blank stare in return. “Awh, come on, Reid. I _refuse_ to believe you don’t know Scooby Doo. Four stoners in a van, trying to catch ghosts, talking Great Dane, solving mysteries—none of this is ringing a bell for you?”

Reid glances at her, then further back to where Morgan and Hotch are in the back of the van with the surveillance equipment. “Aside from the recreational drug use, we’re four people in a van solving mysteries,” he points. “We don’t need cartoons to live this, Em.”

“If you’re calling me a dog, doc,” Morgan warns from the back.

There’s a moment of quiet, both Emily and Reid stifling, which is broken by Hotch himself.

“Dave would _definitely_ be Velma,” he says absentmindedly.

**Eighteen. You and your characters need a dose of something cute.**

Garcia’s the one who flaunts how damaging their work can be, but JJ knows that the others have their own coping mechanisms as well—even if they’re much more determined to hide it then their technical analyst is. All of them have their own ways of brain bleaching.

Rossi has his hunting dogs and, no matter what he says otherwise, JJ knows he spends more time petting them than he does hunting with them. Morgan’s the same—ever since Clooney died, she knows he spends every other weekend popping into animal shelters and offering to play with the dogs there, trading in their awful work for wet noses and wagging paws.

Reid’s not really an animal person, but he comes to JJ’s every Sunday for dinner and playtime with his godsons, and Hotch spends any precious moment he’s not at work with his son.

And Emily… well, JJ’s seen that gal’s iPhone. She knows that the reason Emily’s never got any spare storage space is because of the sheer amount of baby animal gifs she’s got saved on there—this isn’t really a well-kept secret, since JJ’s busted her three times trying to show them to Reid on the sly. There’s something about knowing that a hardass like Prentiss can still laugh at baby big cats or pet hares falling off beds that convinces JJ that, no matter how bad this job gets, it’s never going to break them.

**Nineteen. Your characters found the place that time forgot.**

Hotch knows as soon as they open the door that this isn’t going to be a case that ends well. He can smell it.

The air from the closed in house shoves out like it’s as desperate to be out of that house as he is. They all breathe through it; none of them complain. There’s a missing woman in this home that everyone has failed. Missing for thirty years, except she’s not missing at all, is she? She’s here, in the home she’d been born in, grown up in, before being imprisoned in.

Before dying in.

They find her in her bedroom. It’s locked, but Morgan makes short work of the door. A teenager’s bedroom. It’s as if the teenager in here had turned sixteen in 1986 and never aged another day. And, in a way, Hotch guesses she didn’t, even though she’d lived to forty-eight.

Emily’s staring at the walls, the bands and movies up there a snapshot from the past. Hotch knows what she’s thinking: this could have been her room, apart from the body on the bed. It’s any teenager’s bedroom.

There’s nothing left to save here.

**Twenty: Use these words: thundering, promote, fish, inspire.**

Reid is laughing despite how balls-freezingly cold it is standing out here in the pouring rain. Emily shakes her head at him, hair wet enough to slap uncomfortably into her eyes.

“You inspire me to be a better person,” she shouts, knowing he can barely hear her over the thundering sound of the rain on the ground and trees around them. Reid just laughs more, trying to shine his flashlight into the dark and the storm and getting nothing but the reflection off the rain back in return.

“I’m not being a good person,” he says. “Morgan put money down that we’d cave and come inside once it started raining out here. Rossi told me—and I put a substantial amount down on us remaining out here until it was his turn to replace us.”

It’s Emily’s turn to laugh. “You’re hustling him! Hotch will be on your ass, and Morgan’s. You know how he is when you guys promote gambling.”

“Hotch put money down on us staying too. He has faith in our ability to do our jobs.”

Privately, Emily thinks it’s more that Hotch has faith in his own ability to intimidate them and, after all, Reid is right. They are here to do a job, even if that job is a bullshit keeping an eye on the gate and keeping a list of who leaves and who stays the gated community they’re in. Whoever their Unsub is, he has a way around the digital records maintained of entries and exits—so, here they are, drowning in the pouring rain. God, she hates her job sometimes.

“I feel like a fish,” she says. Reid just inches closer and holds his arm up so she can stand under his waterproof coat, her side pressed to his. “How much did you put down?”

“That’s classified.”

A bobbing flashlight appears through the downpour, Hotch appearing and handing Reid an umbrella. “Go get changed,” he suggests. “Use my room. Don’t let Morgan see you.”

Emily laughs: Reid’s not the only cheater on this team.


	7. Magic Bits: May 11th-15th

**Eleven. Something is wrong with time!**

There’s a corner of the library where one person goes. He’s small, skinny, battered and bruised in too many ways for his age. A boy of eleven with age old eyes, curled up small by the books about castles. For him, it’s three p.m. Saturday afternoon on the seventeenth of June 1991; at home, his mother is a stranger with her brain misfiring and he’s hiding from the boys outside.

A woman steps into the aisle, looking down at him. He’s not used to the look in her eyes, as she looks at him like she knows all the ways that he’s hurting. For her, it’s the first of May 2018; she’d been at home with the man that this boy becomes, and they’d been celebrating their anniversary. Despite this, she’s unsurprised by where she finds herself.

“Have you eaten?” she asks him, her voice too loud in the quiet shelter of the books surrounding.

This isn’t the first time she’s found herself here.

“No,” eleven-year-old Spencer Reid says. He trusts her; he knows her. He’d met her when he was five—she was forty-two—and again when he was eight and she was seventeen. They’ll meet each other on the right side of time one day, when he’s twenty-six and she thirty-seven. “Can you stay this time?”

She replies, “You know I can’t,” and it breaks her heart. Despite this, she takes him out for lunch with the money she has in her pocket, walking him as far home as she can get before she trips and finds herself back in May 2018.

“How am I?” Spencer asks her.

“Sad,” she tells him, kissing him and hoping he never looks as old again as he had when he was alone at eleven.

 

**Twelve. Ever since your character read that book, strange things have been happening.**

He finds the book against his front door one morning, nondescript in a drab dust cover of brown. No title, no author. Just ‘A Human Book’ on the front and that should have been a warning. But Reid reads it in the time between his front door and the street. Afterwards, tucking it in his tote and continuing his walk to the subway, he realises that he remembers nothing.

That probably should have been another warning.

A lady bumps into him on the train. He looks at her and smiles, which she returns; he doesn’t notice that smile because he’s distracted by the way he can _read_ her. Not her behaviour, but _her_. Her skin is an intricate patchwork of words, twisting and curling and shifting so fast in the fractured light that they’re barely able to be seen before they flash away. No one else but him could have read them, but he can.

As soon as she moves away from him, her shoulder no longer on his, they vanish. But it’s too late, his eidetic memory has every last inch of her memorised, from her name to her birthday to her first kiss behind the garden shed in fifth grade. Stunned, he stumbles the rest of the way to work, drunk on his knowledge of this woman he read like a book and wondering if he’s finally as crazy as his mom.

“Reid? Are you okay?” Hotch asks him, his voice sudden and sharp in the foyer outside the elevators, despite Reid not remembering walking here. And, before Reid can tell him not to, he reaches out and touches his arm.

It only takes a second to learn him.

Reid never forgets any of it.

 

**Thirteen. A flower has special properties and it’s just what your character has been looking for.**

Spencer’s hand is slippery in hers. He’s sweating, scared. He shouldn’t be. Despite the dark that surrounds them, he’s safe by her side. Not everything that loves darkness is frightful.

When they get there, she tells him to open his eyes and see what she’s found, the wide, white flowers blooming despite the hour.

“Some things need the moon to shine,” she tells him, seeing the fear turn to awe.

They stay there until the flowers flee the morning sun, closing as they watch.

 

**Fourteen. Use these words: fantasy, leap, ground, nice.**

It’s always been a secret fantasy of Gideon’s, this deliberate dancing with death. Sure, he dances with death every day at work—but this is different. This is entirely his choice. His choice to leave the ground and his choice to throw himself back towards it, to leap back to earth with both feet forward.

It’s not just a nice fancy, this bucket list of his. It’s him proving that there’s life left to be lived—that there’s a reason he walked away from Boston.

To prove it, he leaps.

And lives.

 

**Fifteen. Character A takes Character B to a magical place in order to cheer them up.**

This is probably a mistake, almost certainly, but it’s something that Haley has— _had_ —done every year prior and, even though he missed most of those, Hotch is determined that he won’t miss any more. Not now that… well. Not now.

Santa’s Village is loud and crowded, an untidy line of parents and children leading to Santa’s seat where a large, bearded man sits laughing cheerfully. Jack is silent at Hotch’s side, his little hand in Hotch’s and the other hand clinging to his trouser leg.

“You alright there, buddy?” Hotch asks, even though Haley is barely cold in the ground and that’s never been more apparent than now, when she’s not here with them.

Jack doesn’t answer.

“Do you want to go see Santa?” Hotch pushes some more, feeling Jack press closer. “How about you tell him what you want for Christmas, huh? I bet there might be an action man in it for you.”

 “I just want Mom,” Jack whispers, turning his face into Hotch’s to hide that he’s crying.

There’s not really much Hotch can say to that.

They just leave.


	8. Magic Bits May 16th-25th

**Sixteen. Like a phoenix, she will rise from these ashes.**

She refuses to die until she’s done. No negotiations—Emily Prentiss dies for no man, and especially not for a pissant like Ian Doyle. He acts like he’s the first man to want to kill her.

He’s not even in her top ten.

The first was when she was fifteen. Sure, that hadn’t been a physical death, but she damn well almost lost something. The boy who’d knocked her up and left her cold, he’d wanted to kill the part of her that knew tomorrow held better days. She’d survived him, and her teenage years, and that’s a miracle in itself, that she’d managed to make something of the mess she’d made of herself.

There were her early years at the FBI. The perps she’d faced back then had taken one look at her and thought ‘vulnerable’. They’d always gone for her first, over whatever muscle-bound man she was partnered with. Back when the FBI was still mid-shift between brawn and brain, when they weren’t quite convinced that women had what it took to kick ass. Well, she’d showed them, hadn’t she? Not one of those perps had taken her down, and they’d damn well tried their hardest. She’d worked hard and trained harder and never let one get the jump on her—not the perps, and not the men she worked with.

No one would underestimate her, not for long.

Benjamin Cyrus. Like fuck she was dying by his hands, not when she had so much to live for. There was Reid, who she was taking the fall for not because she thought he couldn’t take it—but because she knew he had what it took to get them out of here. She took a beating so he could save their lives; never once was she scared for her life. This pissant wouldn’t kill her, and Reid wouldn’t fail her. She was right. He got them out, got almost everyone out, and they all lived. Happy ending, for once.

And now Doyle. He rams a table leg in her gut and leaves her to bleed out on a warehouse floor. The last thing she knows is Morgan calling her name, and then nothing. Black, and cold, and absolutely nothing.

She turns her back on the dark and lives again. And again. And again. As many times as needed.

Emily Prentiss dies for no man.

 

**Seventeen. Dialogue only. They bought it as a joke…**

“Why is there a rabbit’s foot here? Morgan? I can see you smirking.”

“Creepy, isn’t it?”

“Not really. Hey, did you know that only a particular part of a particular rabbit killed in a particular place at a particular time—”

“God, Morgan, what have you _done_? He’s going to be talking about rabbits for _hours_ now…”

“…I have serious regrets…”

“— ‘the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit, killed in the dark of the moon’, as the anecdote goes. Given that there’s a traditional correlation between rabbits and—”

 

**Eighteen & Nineteen. Why does it seem like that animal knows more than it should? & Your character has a perfectly logical explanation for magical happenings and another character isn’t buying it. They’re out to prove it.**

They’re looking for a lost child in Idaho, and Emily swears that JJ was right behind her ten seconds ago. Flashlight beam sweeping the area around her, Emily rests her free hand on the butt of her gun. It’s not like she’s worried… it’s not like they’re lost in one of the largest forests in the US and it’s not like her partner has vanished into thin air.

She checks her radio, barely even shocked to find that that’s malfunctioned and that her cell has no bars. Just to cement how fucked she is, thunder rolls overhead. _Booom_.

“Fuck,” Emily tells it, before turning and almost shooting a white dog standing eight feet away from her. “Fuck!”

The dog whines, tilting its head and trotted away a little before returning. Another whine, another tilt. Emily stares.

“What’s that, Lassie?” she teases the animal, looking around for an owner despite the lack of collar. This thing is too friendly for a stray. “JJ’s fallen down the well, right?” Laughing because she’s a little panicked, she checks her radio and cell again—the dog barks. Snapping a quick photo of the thing, she barks back, “What?”

The dog pads up, gently tugging at her pants.

Dumbfounded, Emily stares at it. It… wants her to follow it?

Well, shit, why not? She’s boned anyway.

The dog leads in her a straight line along a narrow gully. Emily’s wary at first, until she finds a flashlight she recognises as JJ’s—then she starts to run. The dog runs too, both of them hurtling deeper into the woods until the animal vanishes into the dark.

“Wait!” Emily yells, but instead of a bark she hears her name called back instead. Rain begins to fall as she pauses, before sprinting forward as she recognises JJ’s voice. In the thicket the animal had vanished into, she finds JJ looking wet and worried—and a child beside her. “Shit! JJ, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” JJ says, eyeing the shivering kid. “Can you wait with her? I need to go get help.”

There’s a lot of things Emily wants to ask right now—like, ‘where’s that dog’ and ‘where will you go’, but she doesn’t. She’s not sure why. There’s gotta be a million logical answers to all of them, but she doesn’t want to ask in case the one answer she gets isn’t logical at all.

JJ’s hands and feet are muddy.

“I’ll wait,” is all she says instead, kneeling by the kid and listening as JJ’s bootsteps fade out way faster than they should in the gloom.

 

* * *

 

“That’s not a dog,” Reid tells her in the triage room at the local hospital where she’s being poked at to check for exposure. He’s keeping her company, studying the blurry image of the white dog on her phone. “Look at the ears and the muzzle.”

“Well, what is it, genius?”

He gives her a strange look before confirming what she’d sort of already known. “It’s a wolf. You said it led you to JJ and the kid? Wolves don’t bark.”

“Well, it did, and it _did_. How do you explain that, Mr Science?”

He shrugs, turning the phone and zooming in on the pictures. “Blue eyes,” he murmurs. “Unusual in wolves.”

Emily shivers.

Finally, he gives her back her cell. “Maybe it’s a crossbreed,” he suggests. “Or was tamed once, there are several wolf sanctuaries in the area. There’s an obvious answer, Em, even if we don’t see it. How are you feeling?”

Like she needs to have a firm talk with JJ, although that’s not what she says to him. Instead, she just smiles and says, “Fine.”

 

* * *

 

She could have thought up something sneaky and clever into working out JJ’s secret. She’s capable enough, but that’s not really Emily’s style.

Nah, her style is a little more forthright.

“Trained wolf companion or are you a werewolf?” she announces one day after knocking on JJ’s front door and bribing her way in with wine and expensive soft cheese. JJ just stares at her, still standing by the door with her mouth slightly agape. “Come on, JJ, I saw that things eyes. No one else has those baby blues but you, especially not a dog. Werewolf or do you have some kind of magical forest bond?”

“Are you high?” she asks instead of answering, narrowing her eyes at her. “Or drunk? If the answer to either of those is no, then you’ve been spending _way_ too much time with Reid.”

“Bullshit, Reid thinks you were some kind of tamed circus wolf a sanctuary took in.” Emily takes a seat; she’s not moving until she has an answer. “Now, come on. I’m your partner, JJ, your friend—I’ve got your back. You can tell me.”

“Emily…”

Emily doesn’t move. She’s getting an answer, one way or another.

Finally, JJ sighs, shoulders folding in. “Werewolf,” she mutters. “I knew that was a mistake, but we were so _lost…_ and that kid would have died. Are you happy? You know my big secret? Now what do you plan on doing with it? You know, this could ruin my life…”

It won’t. Emily hadn’t lied. She’s _always_ got JJ’s back, always.

“Can I see?” she asks, which isn’t what she’d meant to ask at all. But, hey, come on, it’s cool. Magic is cool! She wants a look.

JJ doesn’t answer, just shakes her head and then folds down into a blurry shape of a wolf that finally settles into the blue-eyed animal that had saved Emily’s life. Emily stares and stares and stares, until the wolf becomes JJ once more, watching her worriedly.

“Well?” she asks, swallowing hard. Fear in those blue eyes. “What do you think?”

“You’re _gorgeous_ ,” Emily says, and absolutely means it.

 

**Twenty. What did your character see inside the crystal ball?**

“Alright there, Rossi?” Prentiss had called back at him, watching him linger over the clear glass of the crystal ball that had fallen from a shelf and scared the living daylights out of him. “Don’t look into it, you might frighten yourself!”

Of course, he looks. There’s nothing there, just a tired old man in an FBI vest. His reflection, pah. Magic his crusty ass, the kid’s a dreamer. There’s no such thing as magic.

But he carefully puts the ball back in place before moving on.

Just in case.

 

**Twenty-One. Your character has been told for years the stories of hauntings in this place. Now, it’s their turn to find out.**

“Is this really your idea of fun?” Emily asks Reid, hearing Morgan swear behind them. “I mean, _really_?”

“Yes,” says Reid. He has a notebook in hand and he’s looking at _everything_ , the glee on his face definitely not faked. “Aren’t you having fun?”

She can’t break that smile. She _can’t_. She’d have to present herself to Hotch for murdering his innocence if she did. “I absolutely am,” she lies, looking around at the haunted house Reid got her tickets to explore for her thirty-eighth birthday. Well, on the bright side, at least it’s a unique gift, and definitely more fun than a fruit basket.

“I am,” says Morgan from behind them. Weirdly, Emily doesn’t think he’s lying. “Don’t you get enough spooks at work, kid?”

“Well, yeah, but those monsters _exist_ ,” Spencer replies. There’s an odd kind of logic in that. Emily laughs, right until she spots something ahead of him. They’re alone—it’s the middle of the night, because _of course_ it is, and there’s writing on the wall. Rolling her eyes, she shines her flashlight up there. This place is such a—

 _Get Out,_ says the words, and she almost laughs at the cliché.

Reid squeaks nervously, his own flashlight landing below the writing, where more is scrawled messily. “Not funny, Morgan.”

But Morgan doesn’t answer, just stares at the names written there. _Their_ names.

“Did you give our names when you bought the tickets?” Emily asks Reid, who shakes his head slowly. If she’s expecting Reid to call it quits, she’s sorely disappointed. He turns slowly to face her, the glee returning.

“Fantastic!” he breathes. “Actual ghosts!”

She’s never going to understand this man.

 

**Twenty-Two. Use these words: vial, salt, brew, ethereal.**

Tonight, Morgan’s pretending work doesn’t exist. The dive he’s at Penelope’s picked and he’s going along with it. Club Moonlight, it’s called, and the full moon of every month is witch-themed. His drink—Pen called it a ‘Devil’s Brew—had come in a little chemical vial, there’s salt on the windowsills, and a smoke machine gives the whole place a kind of ethereal air. He appreciates how she still loves magic enough to love this kind of place. And, as she drags him out to dance to _Thriller,_ he definitely appreciates her.

 

**Twenty-Three. Your character has been given the chance to change another’s fate, but how will they use it?**

Hotch is sure this is a dream. Despite all the stories he tells Jack—because he’s determined that Haley’s death won’t destroy Jack’s belief in magic—his own belief has long been eroded. But here he is, gun in hand, and there’s a woman in front. The man who would have killed her is cooling on the floor beside the point where her feet should be touching. Instead, they’re above the dusty floor, toes tipped down and the muscles in her legs lax.

“Thank you,” she says quietly, the entire scene caught in some timeless breath. Above him, he can hear his team. He remembers everything that led to this moment—the jet ride, the case, the debriefing, the profile. It feels so _real_. “Here.”

She offers him a rose. He stares at it, gun still steady, too dazed to say anything at all.

“You saved my life,” the woman continues, every word dizzying. “Snap the stem and you may save the life of another you love—change their fate.”

Haley, he thinks, but is sure he doesn’t say out loud. Despite this, she looks deep into him, her expression sad.

“Yes,” is the soft response. “Even her. But before you do, consider this, Aaron.”

He’d never told her his name.

“You’ll be changing her fate… and maybe there’s no life in which she lives by living by your side.”

He hears someone calls his name; the rose is in his hands. He considers what she’s said; is her life worth his? Because he knows what the price is… there’s no fate where he gets everything he wants.

The stem snaps cleanly.

“Hotch?” Emily’s voice is amused and, when he looks at her, he realises he’s holding a bag of food instead of a gun. They’re back in DC. “What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head, looking at his bare finger. Looking up again, to where a father and child play in the park across the road. Lunch run. They’re doing a lunch run, not a case. There’s no woman here…

“Do you ever think about that?” Emily asks, looking past him to the park. “You know, settling down. Having kids? I think you’d be a good dad.”

And he lets out a breath that hurts as it goes.

Everything has a price.

 

**Twenty-Four. In the dark of the night, in the deep of the woods…**

She knows that the trellis on her wall will take her weight—the first thing Emily had done upon moving into this place was nail the thing sturdy enough to ensure it. It’s the middle of the night and she’s not dressed for the weather, slipping down that trellis and out the back gate.

The woods back here are dark and quiet, but she’s not afraid. Daniel is out here somewhere, waiting for her, and she’s pleased to think how pissed her mom would be to know she’s sneaking out. Maybe it’s time her mom learned that she’s fourteen, not five, and to give her some _space._

There comes a noise. A whisper overhead, and Emily freezes. Suddenly aware of the light of the moon and the silence around. Imagining knives and kidnappers and men with guns—maybe this was a mistake.

But the noise appears, an owl swooping by. Wings of white that are silent and vivid against the starry sky above, wooing softly at the girl below. She breathes again, laughs, and keeps on sneaking out.

One day she’ll learn caution, but not quite yet.

 

**Twenty-Five. This path definitely led somewhere else yesterday. There is a mysterious old house off in the distance and your character can no longer figure out how to get home.**

Reid’s pretty sure he’s lost control of his life. It’s about when he realises he’s more excited about going home, away from prying eyes, than he is to go to work in the first place. When the thought of the two glass bottles hidden in his bathroom is more enticing than the people who were like family to him before he’d realised how fallible family could be. Now, when he thinks of family, his team, he can’t see their faces. All he can see is the barrel of Hankel’s gun; all he can hear is the click click click of the deadly roulette being played with his life.

He finds a way to self-medicate the trigger noise away; if only the marks on his arms were as easy to hide. But they’re not, and he’s not, so he hides and he hides and he hides, until he loses control.

Today’s that day. He’d closed his eyes in his living room with escape in hand and he’s opened them somewhere else. Somewhere he thinks he might know, but isn’t entirely sure, wondering how he got here until he finds his car keys in his hands. No car, or road, and he’s glad for his cell in his pocket.

Wandering aimlessly, he thinks, and then laughs because it’s that or cry. But who can he call?

Not them. Not again. Instead, he walks. Towards a house in the distance, wondering how this is going to help. Maybe they won’t see that he’s nothing but a junkie—maybe they’ll point him back to the road where he’s left his car. But, when he gets there, the house is empty. Abandoned. Decayed. There’s nothing here to save him.

And he’s sure that before Hankel, the path of his life had been leading somewhere better than this, but not anymore. Now it’s led to an empty shell and no one to help him.

But only if he lets it.

He takes a breath and slides his cell out of his pocket, hoping that he’s wrong, that there is help somewhere here to call. And he watches the screen, until the line connects, a voice asking if he’s okay.

“No,” he says. “Emily… I need help.”


	9. Magic Bits: May 26th-31st

**Twenty-Six. The glow seems to come from within the crystal. This is what your character has been searching for all this time!**

It’s just her luck that she’s found _exactly_ what she’s been looking for for years, and she can’t run into the dinky shop tucked away in Chicago and immediately buy the thing—not without her entire team seeing her do it.

_Damn._

“What’s that?” Morgan asks. “A lightsabre replica?”

“A _working_ replica,” she corrects longingly, watching the red crystal blade glow.

Morgan looks back at the team. “I’ll distract them,” he whispers. “You buy it and run.”

 

**Twenty-Seven. Use these words: wand, grimace, kiss, playful.**

“Is that a wand?” Hotch asks with a grimace, finding Reid on his doorstep with a playful kind of grin on his face. “Why the wand?”

“I thought Jack would like it,” Reid says innocently. “From _Harry Potter_. I remember you said that you were reading it together.”

Hotch can’t help a fond smile. “You remembered,” he says, leaning close. “And is my gift literary themed too?”

Reid nods. “It’s a kiss,” he says, his cheeks flushed. “ _Peter Pan_.” But it’s not a thimble he gives away.

Hotch doesn’t mind at all.

 

**Twenty-Eight. Twice today, different strangers have given your character a warning. Both times, they’ve ignored it. The third stranger says, “Duck!”**

Reid had told him, “You’ll appreciate my puns one day,” before sauntering away with a shit-eating grin that Rossi has to fight the urge to slap. Of course, Rossi had ignored him. The kid is a total weirdo. But then, while walking down the street, a stranger tells him to beware of ‘fowl play’, winking before walking away. Rossi shoots an irritable text to the kid that says, ‘your puns are spreading’.

The fact that all he gets back is a manic smiley face emoji, well, that should probably have been a warning. Reid’s notable for going nuclear when it comes to small slights. But the afternoon moves onward, mostly without comment, and Rossi completely forgets about the weird people and their weird _puns_ , which are _not_ the height of humour, thank you very much.

A second stranger bumps into him at the store, straightening his over-sized hat before whispering, “You’re in for an unpheasant surprise,” and booking it out of the store. Rossi stares after him, wondering if he’s finally going insane. This is it. This is how he goes out, on the wings of a flock of bird puns, and he almost wishes one of their unsubs had got him first. At least his gravestone would be kinder.

He spends the rest of the day anxious and waiting, on edge without any good reason why. Every bird fluttering overhead sets his heart to galloping, every stranger gets the side-eye from him. But nothing happens, right up until something does.

He’s in his front garden, watering the plants, when there’s a hollering from down the street. Rossi ignores it, until a woman yells, “Duck!”

He drops automatically, too well trained to not respond to the panic in her voice. With wet knees and accidentally blasting himself in the face with the hose, he lays flat on the ground and searches for the threat, finding—

There’s a fuckton of ducks waddling down the street, a flood of flipper-feet on the tarmac. They don’t seem panicked, just moseying around doing duck things.

“Sorry,” says the man trying to catch them. “Gate on my truck tipped open. I honestly don’t even know why I went this way…”

Rossi just stands and walks inside, going straight for the alcohol cabinet. Fuck _ducks._

 

**Twenty-Nine. It’s a dream brought to life… literally.**

They’re a little drunk. They really shouldn’t be—she’s his unit chief now, she has, what’s it called, power of attorney over him? No, that’s not it… duty of care? Duty of… something. Okay, they’re more than a little drunk, bypassing amusingly tipsy as he snarls straight into angry, storming around her condo and raging about prison. God knows, he needs it. And she’s angry too—another two drinks and she joins him in lashing out against the system that failed him. It’s nicer than admitting that it’s Emily herself who failed to stop what happened to him.

The wine is empty and they’re tired of being angry, together on her couch with music playing in the background and his eyes creased. He’s aged, finally, filled out and grown up. That brings an ache to her chest, hand reaching up to brush those fine lines without her explicit permission. He looks at her as she does so, sadness folding into the lines and leaving him aged.

A song comes on and he winces.

“What?” she asks, reminding herself with every unholy beat of her heart that she has a duty of some kind, a power or something, and neither of those things will allow her to kiss his anger away, smooth it down into something sweeter. Something shared.

“I dreamed of this song,” he says, looking at her like it’s her fault he’s lonely. And maybe it is. “After Maeve… we danced to it. Ha, do you know? I guess that’s the first time I really touched her…I guess I never really did…”

Christ, that hurts. She doesn’t know what drives her, but she takes his hand and kicks the coffee table out of the way, sure that that will hurt in the morning, but not as much as this hurts right now.

“Dance with me then,” she tells him. And maybe she’s a little cruel in that moment, but she’s drunk and scared of seeing him as dead as the woman he still loves is. Maybe she’s also a little sick of seeing him love the dead more than he loves living. “You’re alive, she’s not. Dance, asshole.”

Three years ago, he’d have cringed away from that anger. But he’s older now, and nowhere near as sweet. When she snarls, he snarls right back.

In the end, he kisses her first.

 

**Thirty. Your character always thought it was magic. The truth is far more mundane.**

They begin after Haley divorces him. Every morning, no matter how early Hotch arrives at work—no matter if he beats absolutely everyone else to the sixth floor—there they are, two freshly baked muffins sitting on his desk. Some days, they’re even still warm to the touch. Vanilla at first, like his gifter doesn’t quite know what he likes. After Haley dies, they get more intricate, like this person is trying to grieve with him through baked goods. Walnut, peanut butter, cream cheese frosting—he gets a variety. Every anniversary after, he gets a single red velvet—a flavour he knows that Reid loves, although he also knows that Reid can’t bake.

In the end, Hotch just accepts it. The cupcakes are magic, and he’s never really going to know who makes them, or why. He just wishes he could thank them.

And then Emily dies.

Hotch gets to work to find a cupcake on every desk. Salted caramel on Morgan’s. Coffee on Reid’s. None on Emily’s. They’re still warm.

There’s someone in Hotch’s office.

In the end, he walks away.

They still need magic.

 

 **Thirty-One.** **Character A and Character B are invisibly bound together and one of them has something incredibly important to do… then someone finds out.**

He’s given a choice. Reid’s always known that demons exist. One took his mother’s mind from him when he was a child, too young to do anything about it. Ever since then, he’s made sure he knows everything he needs to know about the dark denizens of this world, in case it ever comes about that he needs to stop them once more. Or, as luck has it, he has to ask their help.

So, when Emily dies, he’s ready. He finds the crossroads and makes the deal. His heart for hers.

It’s no choice at all, really.

He goes home and waits for his heart to stop beating, hoping he gets to speak to her one last time before it does. It will look suspicious, that he’s updated his will the same day he suffers a fatal myocardial infarction, or so his cause of death will be listed as, but he won’t be here to answer the inevitable questions.

And here it comes. There’s a terrible pain, spreading down his left arm and paralysing his breath. Everything turns black and he stumbles up, scared beyond reason and only now realising he doesn’t want to die, even if it means she breathes again on whatever cold metal slab she’s resting on.

But he falls into black, his arm catching the couch on the way down.

And then wakes. It’s morning and his cell is ringing. There’s vomit on his shirt and his whole body hurts. But he’s not dead, and Hotch is calling.

Emily is alive.

There aren’t words to describe the joy he feels upon walking into that hospital room and finding her sitting there, looking dazed and small in the starch-white bed. She can’t speak yet, a side effect of dying, but she still holds his hand when he slips his fingers through hers. Despite the tears that fall as he stands there grinning stupidly at her, his heart doesn’t thump at all in his aching chest, like it hasn’t realised that everything they want is still here for the taking. The doctors are worried about her heart, they tell them, a strange echo that they can’t diagnose and have never seen before. He’s not worried; she’s alive and so is he.

When she comes home, he goes to her and tells her—not that he made a deal with a demon to save her, but that he loves her now and always has. He spills his heart, the figurative one, not the one silent in his chest, out to her until she silences him with her mouth on his. Dying has given them both a new appreciation for not wasting the time they’re given.

And they’re happy together, even if sometimes Reid wonders just what it would look like if he ever strapped himself to a heart monitor. It’s not comfortable to think about, so he doesn’t.

Until the day she flies away from him to save a life. They’re lucky; she only goes one state over. Any further, and it’d be an entirely different story.

All he remembers is saying goodbye to her at the office. When he opens his eyes again, he’s in a hospital and they’re telling him he collapsed and died, right there in Morgan’s arms. That he’s technically still dead; no heart beats in his chest. The monitor is silent, and it’s the fifth one they’ve tried. But he still can’t breathe; Emily is flying home immediately but she’s not there yet, and he fades out again without telling them that he knows where his missing heart is.

It’s Hotch that figures it out. The echo, the silence, their shared terror.

“What did you do?” he asks Reid in the darkened room of the hospital they’re holding him in. There are lines on his face that weren’t there two days ago, before Reid had died in front of him without warning. “Spencer, what did you _do?”_

Emily’s there too, watching from the window. The light through the blinds casts lines on her face.

Reid tells them everything.

“I gave you my heart,” he says finally, closing his eyes against the ache that’s fading now she’s here.

“I didn’t feel a thing,” Emily whispers, face now pressed to the glass. “You died because I moved away from you, and I didn’t feel a thing… I _still_ don’t feel anything.”

But that’s not true, Reid knows. She has her hand to her chest and a troubled look on her face. There’s an echo in there he’s not sorry for giving up.

She’d already owned it anyway, and there’s so much more he’d give to save her than just his heart.


	10. Genre Bits (July 1st-5th)

_1\. Today’s genre is **science fiction**. Science and technology, extra-terrestrial life, celestial beings, spaceflight, and time travel—sci-fi has it all, even if your prompt can’t._

The man addressing her is the kind of rough she recognises; it comes of not trusting people for too long a time. She checks every morning for it on her own face.

“Nice boat,” she says, making sure she’s saucy enough that she seems older than she is. He doesn’t seem fooled. “It’s a YT-1300 light freighter, right? Same as the Millennium Fal—”

“Something you need, ma’am?” Everything, from his dark hair to his cold eyes, says ‘go away’. She focuses instead on the badge on his shirt: Captain Aaron Hotchner.

“Yes. I hear you’re in the business of shipping breakable items.” His eyes narrow, just a flicker, but she takes a chance and shows the grip of her lightsabre from where it’s tucked inside her loose shirt. “Well, I’m breakable. And I need help.”

It’s as simple as this, she tells him and his crew when he takes her aboard his neat-as-a-pin ship. She wants a ride and she doesn’t care where; she’s willing to fight for them, if they’ll take her.

“Why should we trust you?” she’s asked by a woman with alien blue eyes and unsettlingly human features. Whatever she is, Emily doesn’t recognise her. “We can’t afford strays.”

“You can afford me,” Emily says. “I’m Senator Prentiss’s daughter.”

They know that name. She sees Hotchner’s hand flicker to his blaster, the mercenary behind him eyeing her warily, hears the startled whistles of the shy astromech droid they’d introduced as “Reid”.  

“You running from her or towards?” she’s asked.

 “From. As far across the galaxy as possible.”

“Well then,” Hotchner says after a beat of quiet. “Welcome to _Nelson’s Sparrow_.”

 

_2\. You can’t tell a book by its cover. However, in this situation, your character is determined to try._

In the time after Emily dies, he does a number of things. This is one of them:

He starts going out at night. Not to the kinds of places he likes, libraries and science fairs and quiet cafes attached to bookstores. No, he goes to places _Emily_ had liked: bars and nightclubs and jazz lounges. Anywhere with that little edge of spice, a hint of danger, of possibility. He goes to these places, and he looks for a face.

There’s a woman across the club from him and he doesn’t know anything about her except for her clothes and her face, but tonight he’s pretending to know her anyway. Know things about her like the fact that she has a black cat and a tough job and an open heart, and that she loves him for him and that’s something he never cherished enough.

He keeps pretending until she turns around and he can’t any longer: on the cover, she’s Emily, his friend, but the story she’s living isn’t the same.

And there’s no amount of pretending that can change that.

 

_3\. Your character needs to hide their identity. Fortunately, someone has left the perfect item of clothing nearby for them to utilise._

Honestly, did anyone who knows her really think that she wasn’t going to attend her own funeral? She really, really shouldn’t be—JJ had warned her that this whole thing will collapse if anyone so much as catches a single glimpse of her, but when has Emily Prentiss ever done what’s right, or smart? If she did what was right or smart, she wouldn’t be dead to begin with.

And it’s not like she’s rocking incognito chic. Dying does that, it really reduces your fashion choices. Every item of clothing she owns now is either in the apartment of a dead woman—her—or in a bag of bloodied belongings Hotch had grimly taken as ‘evidence’ of her murder. All she has left to her is the hospital-issued pyjamas she’s been quietly existing in. Not really ‘rocking up to your own funeral without being seen’ attire, unless she wants her book to close with ‘the haunting of Emily Prentiss’.

So, she’d improvised. She’s in a pair of loose flannel pants from the hospital physio’s gym and a college hoodie some nursing student had left behind in the lost and found, now overtop of her pyjama top with the hoodie pulled low over her eyes. She thanks whatever absentminded student who’d left it behind for being an XXL, easily hiding anything about her that’s recognisable.

And her sore gut where that bastard impaled her is nothing compared to how much it hurts to see them like this. They all look shell-shocked, except Hotch who just looks sad. It hits her how strange it is to see him openly grieving her—JJ too—despite them both knowing she’s very, very alive. But, then again, maybe they are actually grieving something. The people they were before she made them into liars, likely, or the person she’d been before she’d forced them to become so.

When Reid starts crying, she struggles to breathe through the nauseating pain of it.

When her mom cries too, she leaves. This was a mistake. Emily Prentiss, egotistical to the end.

And, honestly, what comes next isn’t a surprise.

“You’re an idiot,” says Hotch from his car as she sits by the bus stop wondering if they’ll let her ride without a fare. “Get in.”

She does.

 

 _4._ **_Spoonerism:_ ** _“a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect.”_

Rossi’s determined to show JJ how very, very happy he is that she’s finally tied the knot with Will, swooping down on her and spinning her into his arms.

“It’s kisstomary to cuss the bride,” he tries first. Words seem to be escaping him, so he gives up on them: he kisses her cheek and enjoys her beaming smile. “I’m happy for you,” he tries again, and this time doesn’t mangle the words at all.

 

_5\. Today’s sub-genre is **The Bildungsroman**. A story devoted to the growth, education, or moral development of a young protagonist on their journey towards adulthood._

When Aaron is five, he makes his first friend. She doesn’t last very long; before the summer is out, Ally’s parents have figured out something that Aaron’s not really going to realise for a few more years yet. Ally is told that she’s not to speak to him anymore, and the pitying looks begin.

He doesn’t really understand that.

By the time he’s ten, he does. He’s quieter than he was before, with a temper that’s incendiary. He fights because violence is an out and broods because silence is safe. Despite his failing grades, his path is uncertain. There’s potential there, under all the heartbreak and bruises.

When he’s fifteen, someone notices. Aaron’s at boarding school because he’s taken the misery his family have heaped on him and run with it, making sure he causes as much damage as he can on the way out. It’s not a teacher or a peer or anyone he’d expect: it’s a lawyer.

“You know,” he says to Aaron on the day he’s there to talk to the principal about one of Aaron’s friends setting a fire—Aaron narrowly avoiding being involved. “There are better ways to make a mark on the world than burning it into the ground behind you.”

Aaron just stares and thinks this man knows nothing and that he himself deserves _nothing_.

“Just saying,” continues the lawyer in a voice that suggests he cares a lot less than he actually does. “Wouldn’t you rather be the one putting the fires out than starting them? God knows, I wish there were more heroes in this world. I’d be happy to be unemployed.”

Aaron always remembers that.


	11. Genre Bits (July 6th-10th)

_6\. The empty vacuum of space._

Sometimes, Emily dreams of space. An empty void, the lack of gravity pulling her in a thousand different directions as she unravels into nothing, lost to the vacuum. In these dreams, she floats alone. Not really dead. If a person exists in a vacuum, is she even really alive to begin with?

It’s strange, she thinks, how these are the most comforting of the dreams she wakes from. There’s no blood or screaming or horror. They’re safe.

It occurs to her that for someone like Reid, these dreams would be nothing but a nightmare.

****

_7\. Write this prompt in the style of an **epistolary story** , told using a series of documents such as letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, or—for a more modern take—email or text messages._

**Spencer**

_March 03, 19:38_

>Are you sure you don’t want to come to Andrei Rublev with me tonight, Em? You sounded strange on the phone.

What, you can profile over the phone now? I’m fine. You enjoy your night.<

>Don’t be like that. I worry.

Don’t. I’m fine. See :)<

>:|

_March 11, 09:56_

>Where are you?

>Why would you do this without us? We’re your family. WE keep you safe.

>Please come home

_March 12, 18:12_

>I’m scared for you.

Don’t be. I’m fine, and I’m coming home. I promise. [draft]<

 

* * *

 

**Prentiss, Emily Elizabeth**

Passed away dutifully on the 12th of March 2011 in service to this country. Dearly beloved daughter of Elizabeth and Michael Prentiss. Deeply missed by those who knew her.

Family and friends are invited to funeral services to farewell Emily at 10:00a.m. on Thursday the 17th of March 2011.

May God welcome her home.

 

* * *

 

**Spencer**

_March 17, 11:29_

>You have no idea what you’ve done to us by dying, do you? You just have no idea. You’ve NEVER had any idea of your own worth and I’m SICK of it and I’m SICK of you and I can’t wait until I can stop grieving you

>But I can’t

>We buried you today and I hate you for it

_March 18, 02:01_

>fuck you

>we could havesave you if you let us I could have saved you

>I wouldhave died insted of you

_05:32_

>I wish I could hate youlike I hate loving you

I’m so sorry [draft]<

I’m not dead [draft]<

I don’t know how to do this [draft]<

Error 411: the number you have contacted via SMS is unavailable. Possible causes of this are as follows: The number you are trying to reach is out of the service zone, this number has been disconnected, or you have been blocked by this number.<

 

* * *

 

**Spencer**

_November 18, 13:41_

Are you ever going to speak to me again?<

You need to lay off JJ. It’s not her fault.<

>She lied to me.

So did I. So did Hotch. Why aren’t you just as mad at us?<

>When I’m finished being relieved that you’re alive, maybe.

>I don’t think you understand that I *carried* you. Do you want to know how heavy your coffin was on my shoulders?

No…<

>Yeah, well, neither did I.

>Hotch wants us in the conference room ASAP

okay<

_December 25, 05:27_

>Merry Christmas Emily.

Merry Christmas to you too. Why are you awake?<

>I’m a manic insomniac with a caffeine addiction. Why do you think?

>I also hate Christmas

So do I. It’s lonely [draft]<

No plans?<

>None.

Well, I have eggnog and Andrei Rublev on DVD. You in?<

_10:12_

I’m sorry that was presumptuous. Enjoy your Christmas. I hope it’s wonderful xx<

>Want me to bring lunch?

Please<

_8\. The genre of catharsis, **tragedy** explores the darkest depths of human suffering, serving to purge the audience of grief and fear… in theory._

Hubris in Greek tragedy: excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis. As Reid walks up the path to the partially open front door, he thinks: I’ve been here before.

They all have their hubris. Reid is defying his mind, so brilliant and so flawed. He knows it will bring him down one day, no matter how defiant he is about it, no matter how much he prides himself upon the power that it brings him. He does think of himself as higher than others, although he’d never admit it.

He thinks of that as he opens the door.

Gideon had hubris. Excessive pride, certainly. Defiance towards God or gods or a higher power, absolutely. It killed him, eventually.

He thinks of that as he closes his eyes against the stark lights in the hall, following the blood.

Nemesis. In Greek tragedy, the goddess of revenge, divine retribution brought down upon those guilty of hubris. If he believes in a higher power, he believes in Her. Over and over and over, he’s seen Her hand on them.

In a general sense though, nemesis is clearer. He thinks of these definitions when he steps into the room and looks down at the sheet they’ve covered him with. Just like Gideon. Nemesis: an indomitable rival. An inescapable situation. Inevitably leading to misery and death.

Aaron Hotchner’s hubris drove him to this. His belief that he was untouchable, despite all warnings otherwise, despite Foyet.

Despite Scratch.

Reid crouches and lifts the sheet and sees all he needs to see. Then, he leaves. Aaron didn’t need to die to be known as a hero.

But, he did.

 

_9\. When the cat’s away, the mice will play. The problem is, the cat always comes back…_

Hotch ducks out for a coffee and, in the time that he’s gone, things have gone fucky. Garcia blames Rossi. It’s _always_ Rossi’s fault, even though technically probably not this time. Since he’s not here.

She’s going to blame him anyway.

He started it with a wry comment the day before that picking Reid up should be part of the FBI’s fitness aptitude testing. They’d laughed, not knowing it would come to, well, _this_. Reid squeaking a little bit with fear and worry that they’re about to get Hotch-Busted while Morgan sees how high he can lift him up. It’s a little funny—what with how gangly and spidery their little boy genius is—if she wasn’t so scared of getting fired or, worse, frowned at, but also his squeaks are getting more worried and Hotch has been gone an awfully long time and, gosh, maybe Morgan should put him down now…

When he does, Garcia is relieved for all of ten seconds, until Emily demands a turn. Reid, longsuffering, dear-hearted Reid, lets her.

It’s about then that they hear the resigned sigh.

 

_10\. Something terrible has happened—fortunately, at least one of your characters has the perfect idea of how to get through it. For bonus genre awareness, another character isn’t quite convinced of the potential of this plan._

Rossi seems certain that this is how it’s going to go down: Reid isn’t so sure. It’s not that it’s a _bad_ idea, what with how stressed they’ve all been lately and the awful thing with Gideon and there’s scientific proof backing up the whole thing, but Reid’s still not quite on board.

“I’m down,” says Morgan, of course. JJ just shrugs and smiles. Emily looks uncertain.

“I swear, if I have to get my gun out to make you lot hug, I will,” Rossi warns them. Reid thinks that’s a bit unfair. Hotch isn’t being forced to get in on the group hug action, sitting on the sidelines watching them with one eyebrow raised. If it’s a group hug, the _whole_ group should be in on it, right?

“No weapons,” warns Hotch.

“Did you know,” says Reid as JJ and Morgan happily hug each other, Rossi bear-hugging them both. Emily just narrows her eyes and looks aggressively unconvinced, “that a hug is known to reduce existential fears? It’s found that a twenty-second hug has inordinate positive effects on the body, stimulating your nervous system while decreasing feelings of loneliness and—”

“Reid,” says Emily.

“Yes?”

“If I hug you, will you shut up?”

Neither of those things really sounds like _he’s_ getting anything out of it, but he nods and awkwardly extends his arms around her, stiffly patting her on the back. Pat pat, hug done, and he tries to back away—but she’s latched on tight like a limpet, all dark hair and nice perfume and he can feel her _laughing_.

“Hugs are most effective when given by someone you trust,” he says with a sigh.

“And do you trust me?”

He _did_ , before _this_ , and tries to express that in a glare that just seems to amuse her. But she beams a smile back at him and, really, maybe it’s not so bad… in fact, he’s feeling better already. But, before he gets too comfortable, there’s suddenly a lot more arms in on their hug, a lot more bodies, and it’s only when Reid stops looks around that he realises that no one’s left out after all.

Not even Hotch.


	12. Genre Bits (July 11th-15th)

_11._ **_Onomatopoeia:_ ** _“the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named.”_

“What kind of a noise do you think the boy genius’s brain makes when he’s working it so hard?” Morgan asks her one day as they’re watching Reid stare intently at a map, unblinking.

“The sound of coffee brewing,” says Rossi, eavesdropping.

“ _Whirr_ , like one of those old print machines,” Emily suggests.

“Something cute,” is JJ’s offering.

“You guys know I can hear you right?” Reid says, more to the map than them. “I’m right here.”

Hotch looks up, frowning at them, before whispering, “ _Whoosh_.”

 

_12\. Today’s sub-genre is: **dystopian**. If utopia is the perfect world, dystopia is the very opposite. An oppressive and stifling world with distinct classes divided by strict societal control—sometimes apocalyptic, but not always._

It’s been twenty years since the BAU and he doesn’t know who he is anymore. Aaron Hotchner, fabled profiler, former federal prosecutor, upholder of the peace and arm of justice; except, he’s no longer any of those things. He’s back in a courtroom, sure, but they’re not called that anymore, are they? They can’t be. The very implication of the word ‘court’ brings up images into the minds of those who hear it, those who were alive before words became false. Now, definitions are what someone makes of them at the moment, facts are fluid, and instead of trials in courtrooms of the law, illegals are taken to be proven before an assembly.

It seems like a simple change, really. From ‘tried’ to ‘proven’ and from ‘court’ to ‘assembly’, but there’s a lot more power in words than what people want to believe anymore. Word politics, they call it, and it’s claimed more lives than any bomb.

Because now, as one of the people assigned to the facsimiles of juries that are all that remain in this mockery of justice, Hotch understands why the words matter. Proven, not tried, because the only thing that happens in this room is a confirmation of prior beliefs. No one is guilty or not guilty anymore, because everyone who reaches the point of being put upon that stand is only up there for a trial by fire. Burned down before an assembly of faceless drones, of which Hotch is one.

He doesn’t know where they go after being proved. He doesn’t know what happens to them. No one does and no one cares; they’re illegal. If they didn’t want to be, they shouldn’t have broken the law. What law did they break?

Who knows. Laws matter as much as words do now. Not at all, until they do.

On this day, Hotch has taken his seat in the place he’s assigned to do the job he’s been given: if he doesn’t meet his quota of illegals proved, life will become a lot harder for him and Jack. Before he even sees them, he knows they did whatever it is—and even if they didn’t, maybe they should have because they’re going down for it anyway.

So when he looks up and sees a familiar face on the stand, tired and thin and not at all a surprise, it doesn’t really change anything, not really. Emily’s always done what’s right, even when it’s wrong. Even if it kills her, and he’s under no illusions that this isn’t going to kill her—she’ll be proved and cured and sent off to rot, the same as all the others. The same as those who stood up when Hotch didn’t.

He hopes she doesn’t recognise him now.

It’s not like he even recognises himself anymore.

 

_13\. A scene of a Dying Earth, and only two characters left to face it._

In the after, Emily searches for her team. A small part of her knows there’s not much hope, but a larger part knows she has to try. Sometimes she wishes the world was how it was before, even though she knows the only similarity is that the world is still dying, just faster. Much like she’s dying along with the dog; some ratty-nosed spaniel thing with sad brown eyes and a tatty tail he doesn’t look after. She’s named it Spencer.

Less lonely that way.

 

_14\. Write this prompt using the technique of **allegory** , a literary device that is used to convey a hidden or symbolic message._

The home she lives in as a child is a mansion too big for a family of three, Emily rattling around alone inside those high walls and vaulted ceilings. She makes up people to fill it: in the dining room there’s an elephant with wings painted like the wallpaper; in the parlour, there are tigers hiding in the weave of the rug, and you can hear them in there if you listen closely enough to the way they breathe. There’s a family in her closet who love to have her over for dessert and she has friends in her bathroom who hide the soap away. She’s lonely, always, and the house is quiet.

When she’s a teenager, her home is a shabby apartment she shares with strangers. The furniture never matches and she keeps her comic books out in the open, never ashamed to be herself because the surroundings don’t let her be anyone else. She doesn’t know the people who exist in this space with her, but they _do_ exist, and she spends hours learning them. She’s not lonely.

Doyle’s villa in her twenties is as false as she is. The gilding on the walls flakes if she scratches at it with her fingernail and the curtains have labels on them that she knows they don’t belong to. It’s a lie, all of it, and she learns to keep it at arm’s length. Better to be lonely than for these people—because she’s surrounded by people all the time here—to realise who she really is.

And she begins to wonder when she’ll be herself again because she knows there’s something missing now.

She buys a house in DC that she barely steps foot in before she regrets doing so. It doesn’t take much to undo that step, to rip up the tentative foundations she’d only just put down. The walls of that home aren’t high, the ceilings aren’t vaulted, the carpets aren’t shabby, and there’s nothing false about it—but still, she gives it up. Somethings not right, and she blames the house.

But she finds the same thing in London. She’s fleeing something now, away from DC and into a flat that she never bothers unpacking. She lives out of boxes for a while, never lets Mark come to her, and wonders when she’s going to start living. It doesn’t matter that the flat is an empty mirror of her; no one sees it anyway.

But then she goes back. Back to DC, back to the BAU. She buys a new apartment and makes no effort to live in it. Despite this, one day she looks around and sees something new—photos on the wall and the book Spencer loaned her on the couch. JJ gave her those curtains and Morgan helped her repair that window-frame. She’s not even a little bit lonely.

She’s living.

 

 _15\. Today’s genre is **romance.** One of the oldest genres, romance focuses on the romantic love between characters and must (usually) have an _ _“emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” Of course, we know that’s not always the case…_

The first time he sees her, he knows she’s something special. “That’s the girl,” he tells his friends at lunch that day, fully aware that he’s helplessly smitten and heading for disaster. When is his love life _not_ disastrous? “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”

“You’re a hopeless fucking romantic, Aaron,” they tell him, shaking their head at his folly. “What hope do you have of Haley Brooks noticing you?”

But, somehow—and here he blames his incorrigible smile and tempered charm—she does.

The first time he asks if he can kiss her, she says the words that are going to become the by-line of their lives together: “Why not. What’s the worst that could happen?”

The worst that could happen, as they discover years later and long after he’s proven himself right by actually marrying her, is that she falls in love with him. Which she does, sealing her fate. From then on, despite not knowing it at the time, he’s counting the years he’s with her not realising they’re a countdown until the day he kills her. And every year that spins by wildly is another thing to hurt him later, another memory to burn. Another thing to treasure, despite the pain, because living and loving are impossible without the possibility of losing as well.

When she dies, he still loves her. He shouldn’t, but he does. And he knows that this is his fault, all of it, and all because he was right all those years ago: she was something special.

And his greatest regret is outliving her.


	13. Genre Bits (July 16th-20th)

_16\. Where there is no trust there is no love. Is there any coming back from this?_

Spencer doesn’t trust her anymore, Emily can see it in his eyes. Where there’d been an easy familiarity before, now it’s like trying to pet a distrustful cat, all spikes and glaring eyes and ruffled fur with the promise of claws if she doesn’t back away. Which she does, because she’s never dealt well with being the kind of person who knows that she’s the one who fucked up and because she really doesn’t know how to fix this. How do you talk someone into forgiving you for being dead?

In the end, it’s not her who brings them back together; it’s Rossi. That’s unsurprising since she’s also never been the kind of person who can fix what she’s broken. It’s the night Rossi teaches them all to cook pasta, when their meals are settling and the wine is buzzing and she goes looking for Reid. She finds him in the garden, wine in hand, and stands beside him saying nothing until she finally murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he says, trading the wine for her hand and hanging on.

It’s a start.

 

_17\. Someone has gotten between your character and the person who depends on them the most._

If there’s anything that cripples her, it’s the knowledge that, because of her inaction, her family could die today. JJ’s considered this before, actually, just what happens if the absolute worst thing possible happens—but there’s considering it and there’s it actually happening, with Will shot and missing and those _bastards_ on their way to his and JJ’s son.

Henry. JJ closes her eyes and feels her nails bite into her thighs, the same crippling paralysis striking once more. She can’t think, can’t move, even as the SUV just keeps on keeping on, getting her closer to the moment of her extinction with every second of pressure Rossi keeps on the accelerator. She thinks of her son as he was when he was born, so tiny and new and relying on her for absolutely everything. She thinks of the awestruck moment when the nurse had placed him, naked and new, on her bare belly and told her to watch—watch as he wiggled towards her breast despite his eyes being closed and his body too immature to do much more. Instinct. It’s instinctual, that first crawl, and every animal does it—because even as an infant, newborn and shocked to be alive, Henry had trusted her completely to provide for him. He’d known that at the end of the longest journey of his brand-new life, she’d be there to hold him, to feed him, to love him.

And today he could die.

No.

 _No_. That won’t happen. She won’t let it. She opens her eyes and lets her hands relax against her leg, nails no longer biting painfully into her flesh. So long as she’s alive to draw breath, her son will be too—and this bitch she’s chasing, she won’t _live_ to see prison if she harms one hair on Henry’s head.

When they arrive at the house, JJ does just that. She makes sure her son is alive, that he’s okay. And he is—running towards her with his big blue eyes wide and his smile ready—but he’s not safe yet.

And she’s a mom before she’s an agent, so she makes sure that she doesn’t use her gun while she’s near him; she doesn’t need it anyway.

No one, _absolutely no one,_ touches her son and gets away with it.

 

 _18._ **_Juxtaposition:_ ** _“an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, especially for comparison or contrast.”_

It’s in the interim between the office going from Gideon to Rossi that the differences between them are most notable. The photos on the shelf are replaced instead with mementoes and hobbies and trophies, reminders that when Rossi retired he’d been busy living his life instead of running from his job. The furnishings improve because Rossi prefers to live in luxury while Gideon found comfort in something as simple as a milkshake.

It’s different, and, as time goes on, they adjust.

 

_19\. Today’s sub-genre is **picaresque novel** , depicting the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by their wits in a corrupt society._

It’s a trap, of course it is.

They’d been relying on it being so.

“Well now, isn’t this a turn-up?” Rossi says glibly, pretending to surrender as the gilt-edged carriage they’d swooped down upon from every possible direction suddenly opens to reveal the most fabled lawman himself and all his merry men. “Oh dearie me, what will we do now?”

“Just surrender, David,” says Sheriff Aaron Hotchner tiredly, his rifle aimed square between Rossi’s eyes. Rossi’s not worried; he’d taught the man everything he’d known before he’d realised how bullshit all that stuff was. Hotchner hasn’t got the guts to execute him. “Don’t make me haul you in. It’s a hanging for sure this time.”

“Do the right thing, Rossi,” his deputy, the pretty little JJ, tries. Rossi doesn’t fall for that. She’s attractive, but sharp, and he trusts her about as much as he trusts the hulking Derek Morgan standing behind them; all the King’s loyal men.

But he has loyal men too.

“If you take me in, I’m dead,” he notes, glancing to his side where Prentiss looks bored by the whole proceedings. “So, really, hypothetically, we have nothing to lose right now, right?”

They don’t answer.

“For example, if say, I had an expert in everything but _also_ in explosives, who might have wired this road to blow…” Rossi smiles. Prentiss smirks.

And everyone looks down to the ground below them, the clear signs of digging.

“Damn _Reid_ ,” mutters Morgan, eyes narrowed.

And Hotch does exactly what Rossi expects him to do: he lets them go to rob another day—but not before Rossi empties his pockets in retribution for trying.  

 

_20\. What will your characters do when faced with the haunted house and unseen horrors?_

The hotel they’re in is old and dim, with lights that flicker and pipes that rattle. Emily’s of the opinion that it’s actually kind of cool, watching the faucet over the sink turn on and off by itself. If there’s a ghost there, it’s not harming anyone, and she’s content to let it spook away while she focuses on the real monsters. 

Until there’s a knock.

“Can I sleep here?” Reid asks guiltily, already holding his pillow and blanket.

With a sigh, she lets him.


	14. Genre Bits (July 21st-25th)

_21\. Write this prompt with the technique of **ekphrasis** , where a visual medium is described using prose._

To anyone who watches the video stored in the digital archives of the FBI under ‘Hankel, Tobias’, this is what they’d see:

The first bunch of videos are set in the victims’ homes. The viewer sees the terrible build-up, gigs and gigs of it. People living their lives, unaware that the man about to end those lives already has eyes within their homes. After the build-up comes the equally terrible ends: the viewer sees those people die. It’s a horror movie in every way but one: these videos are real. Each is lives taken, each is people shattered.

In those files, there are other audio files. The calls made to emergency services moments before the knife struck home. If the viewer wishes, they can listen to the hoarse, grating voice of those people’s murderer. They can listen to him perverting the words of God to reach his own eventual end.

And then there are these videos.

Of the few who do open these files in the years after the Hankel case has long been closed, some of them know the man within. Even if not by name, they know him by sight. Spencer Reid, after all, has been a staple of the BAU for a long time now, as expected within the bullpen as is the carpet or walls. People recognise him, but never like this.

The video is silent for the most part. The camera had been running beyond what Hankel had broadcasted. It’s a cruel mockery of the man they recognise. On the screen, he’s smaller than life and he’s broken to boot. There’s blood in his hair and spooling down his face. Bruises litter the skin that’s bared to them, his leg crooked grossly against the chair he’s slumped in. Only one person notices this when they watch it: he’s not tied to that chair. What Hankel used to control him is a cautionary tale to all trainees: you can be overcome.

That person looks closer and shivers to see the evidence of the binds holding Spencer Reid to that chair: the belt around his arm and the broken skin. The rash of red, bruising and blood, the track-marks too small to be seen for sure. The empty hypodermic that’s left there at one point. The blown pupils and empty gaze of the agent as he wakes and sleeps and wakes and sleeps and never looks close to escaping.

The videos also show his death. Several of the watchers turn it off here; incidentally, those who turn it off are those who recognise him by sight. It’s uncomfortable to see the man on the desk opposite you convulsing and dying on the floor. It’s uncomfortable to see him suffer.

It’s haunting to see any of it.

It’s a cautionary tale: this could be you. For three days and two terrible nights in 2007, it was Spencer Reid.

Don’t get cocky.

 

_22\. Today’s genre is **fantasy.** Any story involving a world of unrealistic settings: dragons, elves, vampires, witches, or the lesser known beings such as kelpies and jackalopes. See what you can do when everything gets a bit fantastical._

“Youse the witch-hunters?” they’re asked when they ride into the village together. Rossi just rolls his eyes. They’ve got the white Roman collar of the Catholic clergy and the red Roman cuffs of the witch-hunters guild; what else do these people expect?

“Where’s the witch?” Hotch asks coldly. A lifetime of trying to save these people from damnation, and they still hide the guilty and avert their eyes when they ride into town. It’s insulting, really, even if a small part of him whispers that it’s also understandable. And hadn’t Rossi said it best, when he’d first taken Hotch under his wing when Hotch was nothing but a hotshot hunter with no tact to speak of?

 _We’re torturers too,_ he’d said, pissing off Hotch who, at the time, had seen nothing wrong with that. But now… he’s older now, and he knows not everyone reported to them is guilty—his disdain for these people no longer extends so far that he condones what the guild does to them.

But what choice do they have?

They’re pointed out of town and onwards they ride, expecting the woman to flee them. But she doesn’t. She’s waiting in her ramshackle hut, stained glass windows casting rainbow patterns on the dirt the witch-hunters ride over. “I’m not a witch,” she says when they draw up before her.

“That’s what they all say,” Rossi responds blankly. She sure looks the part, with razor-sharp black hair and a long, pointed nose, but it’s her eyes that catch Hotch’s attention. They’re dark and discerning and he thinks: this woman is nothing like the others. “You got proof?”

“I have someone to speak for me,” she says with another smile like that. “And I have a God who doesn’t believe in torturers.”

“Do you now?” Hotch asks, curious despite himself.

All he gets in return is an, “Ask him yourself,” her gaze drifting past him. “I’m nothing but a familiar.”

And, when Hotch turns, there’s a man standing there—and then nothing.

When he wakes, he’s a raven in a cage. There’s an owl looking startled next to him, the feathery tufts above its eyes eerily reminiscent of Rossi’s eyebrows.

 _Shit,_ thinks Hotch.

 _Always knew we’d go wrong being sexist pricks,_ Rossi responds with a hoot.

Beside them, the woman appears, leaning close and studying Hotch. “Hope you like mice,” she informs him pertly, closing her dangerous eyes with slow satisfaction. “You’re going to be in there until he thinks you’ve learned your lesson.”

 _What lesson?_ Hotch asks angrily, jumping around on his perch.

“Appearances are deceiving,” says the witch from beside them, a man with a wiry frame and thick glasses. “And your faith is cruel.”

Rossi says nothing, just sighs and closes his eyes.

And there they stay.

 

_23\. Time is a great healer, and it sure has been a long time…_

When Jack is grown, he takes his children somewhere important to him, somewhere he’s never really thought to take them before. Ally is too young to really understand the gravity of the moment, but Damian seems to understand. The walk across the grass is muted but comfortable, both of Jack’s hands filled by his children’s, and his wife walks beside them.

“Is this Grandma?” Damian asks when they reach the grave where Haley Brooks rests. Jack looks down and wonders if his dad is ever sorry that she died a Brooks and not a Hotchner, or if he’s never thought of it past the grief of her being dead in the first place.

“It is,” he says quietly. It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. He’s burned a lot of candles to talk to her, even though her voice only exists in the home videos he’s watched. “She died protecting me from a monster, you know the story.”

“She’s a hero.” Damian nods seriously. “I want to be a hero like Grandma too.”

Jack just smiles and ruffles his hair. He’ll learn, one day.

 

_24\. A fluffy interlude. Your character is asleep somewhere unexpected, and they’re missing something very important._

It’s been a rough case. They’re on day four and no one in the team is getting enough sleep. Hotch is starting to feel like his eyes are about to fall right out of his head, only realising that he’s falling asleep at the desk when the case file under his nose is suddenly a lot closer than before. Jerking upright, he glances around hoping that no one saw that—noting JJ’s red eyes and Rossi’s hang-dog expression and the glazed look on Morgan’s face. They’re at the end of their tether, and he knows nothing more is getting done tonight. Time to all go recharge.

He tells them this, making sure each and every one of them leaves the precinct before turning to pack up his own belongings. The hotel is just down the street, so he’s not worried about any of them driving tired, which means his mind can remain blissfully empty of all but the thought of—

Where’s Reid?

He goes looking, asking the officers on third shift if they’ve seen his youngest team member. None of them has, which isn’t surprising—most of them have only just clocked on and are still doing their intakes. Curious and a little concerned, Hotch keeps searching. He’s not in the breakroom, or in the file room, or talking to anyone in the squad room. A text to Prentiss confirms that he’s not back at the hotel.

Now worried, Hotch jogs outside, turning in a sharp circle looking for a familiar profile. His phone is silent, no response from Reid—

There. There’s a shape in the front seat of the SUV, unmoving when Hotch sprints towards it. He’s terrified for a second but finds, when he gets there, that there’s no danger here. Just Reid curled up in the front seat and fast asleep, not even twitching when Hotch opens the door to check he’s okay.

With a thin smile as his heart rate slows, Hotch leans the door shut and goes to the back of the car to fetch the blanket they keep back there for emergencies. After a shock like that, he’s not all that tired himself. Maybe he’ll just cover Reid over and wait for him to wake, working on the case in the driver’s seat beside him.

Just in case.

 

 _25. **Anthropomorphism:**_ _“the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities, such as a god, animal, or object.”_

Reid doesn’t fully trust his gun, always sure that it’s passing silent judgement. It begins after Hankel. The Glock 26 he’s always carried, that Hotch gave him, begins to feel wrong. He fancies it’s because it knows what he did in Hankel’s hut—it knows he’s not at all worthy.

So he switches to a revolver. That’s easier to handle, though he still doesn’t trust it. It feels dangerous and alive in his hands.

It reminds him he could die.

 

_26\. Today’s sub-genre is **lost world.** Somewhere in your universe, there’s a world lost out of time and space… and your characters have found it._

Elle is lost. After leaving the BAU, she wanders aimlessly, doubting anyone cares. She wanders and she wanders and she wanders until suddenly she becomes aware of a door. She’s in a part of town she’s never been, so a door really shouldn’t be that startling to her, except this one is. For one, it’s in a startling place: smack bang in the middle of the street. She stares at it, wondering how the fuck it’s staying upright, who the fuck put it there, where the hell it goes.

That last thought should be obvious, and she laughs at herself for even thinking it. Obviously, it goes nowhere. Just to prove this to herself, she marches right on over there and opens it, stepping through without thinking. And isn’t that just like her? It’s exactly what got her fired, after all, acting without thinking. It’s what almost let that scum escape.

But she’s not on the street anymore. She’s somewhere else, in a market with a cement roof, looking up and staring at where the sky should be and finding only concrete. Around her, people bustle, none of them quite _right_.

She kind of feels like she belongs. She’s not right either.

“Where am I?” she asks a stranger, turning and finding that the door is gone. Oddly, she’s not that worried by that—where would she go anyway?

“Nowhere,” the man says with a smile. The rat on his shoulder smiles too.

“Neverwhere,” says the rat. “Where the lost go, lovey. Where those who don’t ‘av a place up top. ‘Av you got a place up top?”

And Elle thinks, _no._

She belongs here.


	15. Genre Bits (July 26th-31st)

_27\. What will your character[s] do when thrown into the dusty, one-horse town of an old-style Western?_

He’s been riding all day and all night, only to find that the town at the end of his travels regards him with a fixed kind of mistrust. Hotch doesn’t really blame them. This far West there’s no law, and he’s clearly some kind of lawman and not the sort they respect either.

In his dusty clothes, he rides right on past, figuring he’ll camp and try again tomorrow without his lawman’s clothes. But the night is cold and his horse is weary so when he sees a campfire waiting under an old bridge, he rides to see what’s down there.

A man with a horse that looks more like a mule is sitting under there, the man watching him ride down with no sign of mistrust. “Need a seat, stranger?” he asks, his accent not familiar. Hotch can see worn-out books in his satchel. “There’s room by Jack.”

“Maybe.” Hotch settles his horse and dismounts, looking at the man. “You have a name?”

“Spencer,” says the man, all broken down tweed and tired eyes. “Spencer Reid.”

Oddly, Hotch decides to trust him.

 

_28\. Write this prompt using the technique of **metaphor,** making a comparison between two things that aren’t alike but have something in common, usually for rhetorical effect._

When the gun had fired and taken Maeve from him and everyone else who’d loved her, it felt like it had taken something else of Reid too. Some part of his body located in approximately the upper chest region. Something vital and integral to the continued functioning of not only his body but also his world entirely. In short, he knows: something of him died with her that day when he’d tried and failed to save her life. Just like that, with the crack of a gun sounding just like a heart breaking, his life is suddenly darker for the loss of her.

And that’s it, really. It’s that what he notices most. Things are dimmer now. His home is lonelier without the anticipation of an email’s arrival. His curtains are drawn because he can’t bear to see the people continuing to live on without her. If she’d brought light to his life, the realisation that he both can love and be loved, that light has fallen. His sun is gone.

It’s night now.

When he finally opens his eyes again, remembers how to breathe without grieving her, it’s months later and his team has become accustomed to the ghost he’s become. The man with part of his heart now beating six-feet underground. They’re careful around him, pausing before they mention aspects of cases that correspond with Maeve’s. They don’t invite him out, because they know he just wants to go home and grieve.

He doesn’t know which one of them does it, but he expects it’s Rossi. On this evening when he gets home to his midnight apartment, lonely and cold now, there’s an email waiting. He blinks. Stares at it. Opens it, not sure what to expect.

It’s Emily. She says something very simple: a simple ‘hi’ followed by ‘how are you?’

He responds, of course he does. With another simple message: he sends back ‘I’ll be okay’, and it’s not a lie. One day, he will be.

It’s remarkable, he’ll realise after, how a simple hi snapped his world back into vivid clarity. Dark still, yes, because the light he’d had is gone and there’s nothing to change that—but maybe not over. The world doesn’t die just because the sun goes down and the moon comes out, and he doesn’t die just because Maeve did. Not when he has friends to remind him that not _every_ part of him is in that grave and it’s selfish to consider otherwise.

And, in the years to come, as the grief fades and he finds a different kind of light to guide him—this one pale to Maeve’s bright gold, but no less luminary—he remembers: the sun isn’t the only thing in the sky that people have found hopeful, and Emily has always looked beautiful under the light of the moon.

 

_29\. Today’s genre is **cyberpunk** : a futuristic setting that focuses on a “combination of lowlife and high tech featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.”_

She worked hard for this life, or so she’s assured. It’s a Good Life. The only Good Life to be had in this miserable, broken—but she blinks and shakes her head, reaffixing a smile so her kids don’t see her frowning. No one frowns in a Good Life. Why would they need to?

“I’m off to work, Emily,” says her husband, hugging her with one arm, the other ruffling the hair of their youngest. Emily lets him kiss her, looking around the kitchen at everything that’s going to need to be done before he gets home: the floor again, the kids have tracked mud on it, those scamps. Wash and brush the dog. Make a house a home. That’s a Good Life, right?

Again, a flicker of a frown, like there’s a storm pressing down on her perfect life. But she loves her husband and she loves her kids, here in ~~dreary~~ sunny suburbia, and she’s earned this life. She’s earned it. She’s—

 _Emily_.

It’s a thought. She tells her kids to stay and gets up to walk ~~towards~~ away from the thought. It’s not part of the life she’s earned. She loves her husband and she loves her kids and—

_Emily. We’re waking you up._

_Wake up._

“But I don’t want to,” she tells the clock in the living room. She’s earned this. A headache thumps. Is there even aspirin here? She’s never thought to ask. “I love—”

A hand touches her shoulder and she opens her eyes, the sun-bright world of her Good Life shattering around her and replaced instead with concrete walls and a steel bed, naked with nothing but the cybernetic implant implanted into the back of her neck. It hurts. She touches it, her body barely listening to her commands. Muscles wasted.

“Spence?” she mumbles, recognising him. “Where’s my family…”

“Here,” he says firmly, slipping a hand behind her back to ease her up. She feels the exact moment he unjacks her from the simulation, her brain rushing back online. “Can you walk? We’re getting you out.”

We.

The team.

“No,” she admits.

“That’s fine,” he responds. “I’ll carry you.”

 

_30\. United we stand, divided we fall. What lengths will your characters go to avoid being divided in the first place?_

Thank the lord for David Rossi’s quick thinking, that’s all Morgan can say. There’s a lot of things to be thankful for right now, as they cling frantically to the side of a gully they shouldn’t be down as a storm tries its best to make sure they’re no longer down there. Watch out for flash flooding, they’d been warned—but then they hear the kid they’re looking for screaming for help down here. And Reid’s got him now, which is great and all, but it means that Reid’s got no arms left to hang on to anything.

It’ll take one more torrent of water, already ripping around their legs, and they won’t have a Reid anymore either.

“Everyone, quick,” Rossi roars, conjuring rope from somewhere. “Tie everyone in and if anyone goes down, pull them up damnit before they drown! Fast!”

And it’s a damn rough time for all of them, both Reid and JJ going down twice, Reid managing to keep the kid’s head out of water _somehow_ , but they survive. They all survive.

Thank David Rossi.

 

_31\. There’s something wrong your point of view character today. The only thing that can be relied on is that they’re completely unreliable._

There are people in danger around him. He can see it in the flicker of their lives, so close to guttering out. He can see it in the beat of their unholy hearts. And he’s a hero, always, so he does his best to save them. Gathers the ones who are closest to dying and tucks them away where they’ll be safe, in the hidden room below his floorboards. They’re noisy down there, but safe, even if sometimes he has to stamp his foot on the floor to tell them to stop knock knock knocking away—don’t they understand that he’s trying to _help_ them?

Sometimes, he sits and talks to them. Tells them about why he does what he does. Sometimes, he tells them about Marceline and how much he misses her. He even slides a photo down there, hearing the knocking stop for a while as they consider that he’s just a man, not a god.

It’s when he’s out for milk and eggs, so he can cook them a nice breakfast and maybe get some sleep if they stop knocking for long enough for him to do so, that he sees her. A little girl with strawberry blonde hair, a paisley dress, and a distractible mother. She looks just like Marceline, just like his little girl, with the same dimly flickering life so close to being snuffed out.

He takes her. He saves her. Under the floor she goes with the others, but she doesn’t knock. He’d know if she did—he knows all their knocks by now and she’s silent and angry. She resents him for saving her.

Just like Marceline.

When the day comes that the knocking comes aboveground, the door kicked in and his home filling with harsh-faced men and women in FBI vests, he’s not surprised. He doubts they’ll believe he was doing what was right. He’s laying on the floor wishing his Marceline would knock for him.

They gag and recoil as they enter the room and he smiles at them, gesturing to the floorboards. Flies hum. Someone comments on the stink.

“Do you hear them knocking?” he asks before they take him away. He does. Even when he’s left that place, he still hears them knocking.

Except Marceline.

 

 **_Bonus Finale:_ ** _Conclude with JRR Tolkien’s concept of **eucatastrophe** : a sudden and favourable resolution of events in a story; in short, a happy ending._

Even Hotch makes it. It’s been years since they’ve seen him, and he’s changed in that time. His stern countenance has given way to easy smiles, his suits—usually, but not tonight—replaced with clothes suitable to playing sports with his son. He’s taken up gardening, which none of them can picture but which he seems avid about. The freedom to be _free_ following Scratch’s death has been kind to him. Jack is by his side, and he’s happy too, older than he’s ever been and growing up to be every bit the man his father is, and more.

JJ’s always been happiest when she’s fulfilled both as a mother and an agent, and tonight she’s both. There’s the knowledge that she’s everything she’s ever wanted to be and her family are closer than ever. Will looks at her like he’s still stunned he could be this lucky, and the boys are rivalling Jack in how quickly they’re growing up.

Morgan’s there. He wouldn’t miss this for the world. Hank announces to the gathered group that he’s going to grow up to be a magician, performing a handful of sleight of hand tricks that they all know a singular person is responsible for teaching him. Despite leaving the BAU, Morgan’s happy too—he has his family and another on the way, and he’s going to go home to them every night. That’s his happy ending.

Garcia’s happy because everyone she loves is here and alive and okay. She’s sad too because there are faces missing that shouldn’t be—and faces here that _should_ be and haven’t been for a while, like Hotch and Morgan and Blake and Kate, but they’re only here for one night and then they’ll be gone again. But they’re living their lives and she won’t begrudge them that, because that’s exactly what she’s doing with hers: living it, happily.

Emily’s not there: she’s being a leader right now, talking one of them through a minor crisis of faith. “You’re going to do great,” she tells him, straightening his tie and resisting the urge to tidy his hair. She’s happiest here: in her home, in DC, with the family she’s chosen to surround herself with in the career she worked her ass off for. She doesn’t need a husband or a wife and a gaggle of kids, this is what she wants: all of this. And this moment, hugging him tight and telling him he’s going to be great. That this is _his_ happy ending, the one he’s been hinting at for fifteen years now. Finally here, and he’s fought so hard for it.

“Okay,” Reid says, grinning crookedly at her, looking ill. “I think I might need you to prop me up.”

“What are Best Women for?” she says, ending this moment and beginning another. “Come on. Let’s go get you married.”


	16. Little Bits (Drama Bits)

**Someone has a long-overdue apology to make, but it’s up to the other person to decide whether they’ll accept it or not.**

She doesn’t have the nightmare anymore. The one with the girl on the hill outlined against the sky. Emily hates the feeling of knowing that girl is relying on her, and she hates the repetitious moment when she crests that hill and finds it empty. She hates the panic of knowing so intimately what the world can do to someone so small and vulnerable, but not as much as she hates that girl’s dark, dark hair and her too-smug smile. Both of those things serve to remind her this: of all the people she’s failed, she’s failed herself the most.

And she guesses that she doesn’t have it anymore because there’s no point shaming Emily Prentiss about her unholy past when Emily Prentiss is dead and buried.

Unfortunately, this reprieve is temporary.

It’s barely a week after she returns from the dead when she falls asleep only to find herself on the top of that hill. The top, not the bottom, and she looks at the girl beside her. They don’t make eye-contact: the girl is silent and Emily hurts for her.

“I’m sorry—” Emily begins, not sure which sin she’s apologising for—failing her or forgetting her or even running away to begin with.

But the girl cuts her off, looking up and narrowing her eyes. “Don’t,” she says, and her voice is Emily’s too. “It’s not about us anymore. Doyle’s dead.”

“Who’s it about then?”

The girl doesn’t answer, just smiles, and when Emily wakes up it’s with the knowledge of what comes next. The first thing she does is send a text, just two simple words: _I’m sorry._

Then, she sends six more.

 

**Solitude can be a much-needed break, or it can be hell. How does your character feel about being alone today?**

Aaron had married Haley on the first day of spring. It’d seemed appropriate at the time: rebirth, regrowth, new ways of being. And always the understanding that soon there’d be a child, just as new and promising as their marriage had been.

This year, he goes to see her for their anniversary, eighteen springs after the first. The thaw is late, which seems appropriately acrimonious for this penance he’s paying: alone.

Her grave is no place for their child.

 

**In the right context and from the right person, a single touch can mean more than many words.**

There’s nothing of Emily left that she hasn’t given up for this job. Her body, her morals, and now her mind—Scratch controls her eyes with haunting ease, warping her reality and making it impossible to know what’s real and what’s part of his torturous delusions.

Except this. Reid’s suddenly there, and she buckles and begs him to ~~be real~~ stay. And when he does, she knows he’s _real_ because delusions never touch.

Her reality returns with the arms around her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap, folks! These will be the last of my mini-prompt fills for good as I slowly begin to finish up all my in-progress fics and move away from writing fanfiction. Don't worry, I have enough fics in progress that I'll still be bopping around this fandom for a good while yet, but I won't be beginning anything new that I haven't already committed to--which means no more monthly prompts fills. I'll miss them. It's been fun.


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